Country Town Research Articles

12516 Bilateral Adrenalectomy And Bariatric Surgery For Hormonal And Metabolic Control Of Classic Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia

Abstract Disclosure: G. Palú: None. A.M. Rodrigues: None. Background: Hyperandrogenism is sometimes difficult to control in female patients with classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), requiring supra-physiologic glucocorticoid dose with its metabolic consequences. Clinical Case: A 25-year woman with salt-losing CAH has been followed since she was born, requiring high glucocorticoid dose (hydrocortisone dose equivalent 50-75 mg), in addition to fludrocortisone (0.1-0.15 mg/day), without control of hyperandrogenism (testosterone and androstenedione levels more than 3 times ULN). She progressively gained weight, reaching 116 kg (256 pounds) and BMI of 46 kg/m2 when she was 17 years old. Bilateral adrenalectomy was performed in 2016 for disease control and to lower glucocorticoid dose. Androgen levels were supressed, glucocorticoid dose was reduced to 5mg prednisone (hydrocortisone dose equivalent 20mg) and she lost 10 kg of weight, but she remained in class III Obesity (BMI 42.5 kg/m2). Serious adrenal crises were not reported after bilateral adrenalectomy. Pharmacologic obesity treatment was done (sibutramine plus topiramate) and she lost 16 kg of weight, reaching 90 kg and a BMI of 36 from April 2017 to February 2020. She stopped treatment during the COVID- 19 pandemic and regained weight, reaching 106 kg again. She was lost to follow-up and returned in November 2023. In May 2022, she was submitted to a gastric bypass in a country town. She achieved 71 kg with a BMI of 28. She was feeling very well, taking post-bariatric vitamins and minerals, combined oral contraceptive, prednisone 5 mg/day (hydrocortisone dose equivalent 20 mg/day) and fludrocortisone 0.1 mg/day. Until now, she did not have any adrenal crises requiring parenteral glucocorticoid use. Conclusion: Even though treatment was aggressive with two surgeries that could lead to increased risk of adrenal crises, the patient had a benign course. New medicines that block CRH or ACTH action in CAH patients could prevent excessive glucocorticoid doses and weight gain and would be a better alternative to bilateral adrenalectomy in cases such as this one. Presentation: 6/1/2024

A Reusable Past. Opportunities for the Utilization of Industrial Heritage in Salgótarján, Hungary

AbstractIndustrial heritage is not just the industrial landscape, buildings, and material objects, but also the highly complex cultural heritage created by industrial society, with many unique features. The former industrial towns of East-Central European countries have little memory of their early capitalist industrial past, and their socialist legacy is mostly seen as an unwanted and unwelcome burden. Industrial heritage preservation in Hungary was also adversely affected by the ideology of de-industrialization in the late 1980s, and this was compounded by struggles over the politics of memory. Salgótarján, as the seat of Nógrád County, is a city with county rights that has one of the worst social and economic indicators in the country, with dozens of slums, many of them on former industrial sites. The number of sites suitable for greenfield investment in the valley town is low, while the proportion of under-utilized brownfields is high. The real turning point in the development of the settlement was the opening of the mines and the mining boom in the second half of the 19th century. The opening of the mines was soon followed by the construction of larger industrial plants: the steel mill, the hollow-glass and later flat-glass factory, and the ironworks (stove factory). Initially, skilled workers were recruited from abroad, which laid the foundations for a unique society, as much of the population had no ties to the settlement, or even to Hungary—only to the work and their employer. The industrial society of Salgótarján formed a well-defined local community with a sense of identity. The management of the companies and factories, the network of workers' welfare institutions, the managed leisure programs and facilities, and of course the built environment of the colonies played a major role in all this. Under state socialism, the factories continued to operate with an artificially inflated workforce, and after the political regime change in 1989, the privatized plants closed down with dramatic abruptness, leading to social trauma and high unemployment in the settlement. The preservation and presentation of industrial heritage is also important for the city's identity while the built environment is undergoing a radical transformation, which is why buildings that are deemed worthy of preservation should be given a new function as soon as possible so that they may remain an integral part of the settlement.

Bushranger Re-Enactments: Legend And Landscape

The re-enactment of events from Australia’s history as popular entertainment has dropped away in the twenty-first century. Whilst Old Sydney Town attracted crowds from 1973 through to 2003 with its daily parades of British red coats who marched down to an artificially constructed ‘Old Sydney Cove’, Australians today often have a more conflicted view of Australia’s colonial history. If national identity is maintained through acts of ‘remembering’, as suggested by Ian McBride (2001), the past can be a contested issue that impacts on what is accepted as popular representation. Yet the persistence of bushranger escapade re-enactments, though set in colonial times, suggests that issues beyond Australian national identity are at work in maintaining the popularity of such events. Bushrangers in Australia have fuelled imaginative representations in theatre and then later cinema since the early 1800s, with Andrew James Couzens (2019) stating that the Australian “bushranger legend … responds to the historic and mythic characteristics of outlawry” with “the outlaw as heroes”. This paper investigates three specific bushranger re-enactments. In Braidwood, south-eastern New South Wales, from 1865-1867 the Clark Gang, Tom and John Clark terrorized citizens and were known as ‘the bloodiest of bushrangers’. In 2017, the 150-year anniversary re-enactment of the Clark Gangs’ shooting up of the small country town of Braidwood attracted crowds keen to witness, as well as take part in the drama. The second re-enactment occurs regularly through performances by the Gympie Historical Re-enactment Society. Opting to entertain tourists, the group have staged a ‘Bushranger Show’ at numerous sites throughout inland regional Queensland. The third re-enactment occurred annually, until Covid struck, at Canowindra in northern New South Wales. In 1863 the notorious bushrangers, Ben Hall and Johnny Gilbert locked a group of villagers in the Canowindra pub, the re-enactment takes place at the site of these events, the now named Royal Hotel in the main street of Canowindra. These re-enactments are investigated through multiple lenses of performance, place, and politics. The site-specific nature of these performances positions them as specifically different than performances depicting Australian bushrangers in the cinema or theatre.

Letters to the editor: reporting disasters and creating identity in the late nineteenth century Philippines

ABSTRACT A revolution in how news was reported occurred in the Philippines during the late nineteenth century with the publication of daily newspapers, the establishment of a postal system, and the construction of a telegraph network that allowed correspondents in the provinces to give timely accounts of what was happening in country towns and their hinterlands. Many of these reports graphically described the typhoons, floods, fires, tremors and the like that all too frequently afflicted rural communities. These descriptions mainly took the form of letters written to the editors of Manila-based newspapers, such as El Comercio, Diario de Manila and La Oceania Española. Who were these correspondents, where were they, what were their concerns and what did they have to say? Looking in depth at the newspaper accounts of one year, 1881, a singly uneventful year in terms of ‘big news’, this article provides a snapshot into rural life and its vicissitudes towards the end of the Spanish colonial era. It also explores how reporting the news began to build a collective consciousness of the Philippines as a nation.

Christians in Jewish Houses: The Testimony of the Inquisition in the Duchy of Modena in the Seventeenth Century

This article concentrates on Modenese inquisitorial processi that investigated interactions between Jews and Christians that took place in their domestic premises, especially the more spacious dwellings in country towns and villages where there were no ghettoes. These investigations confirm that inquisitorial vetoes on socializing were blithely ignored, and that Jews and Christians often seemed to have no antipathy for or suspicion of each other. As will be shown, Christians went into Jews’ houses, but Jews seldom appeared to enter those of Christians. The reasons for this are suggested below.

Kilometer 101 by Maxim Osipov

Reviewed by: Kilometer 101 by Maxim Osipov Robert Allen Papinchak MAXIM OSIPOV Kilometer 101 Ed. Boris Dralyuk. Trans. Boris Dralyuk, Nicolas Pasternak Slater & Alex Fleming. New York. New York Review Books Classics. 2022. 296 pages. MAXIM OSIPOV'S stunning second collection of six short stories and four essays, Kilometer 101, follows his scintillating Rock, Paper, Scissors and Other Stories. The title refers to the inauspicious demarcation line for former convicts who are only allowed to live one hundred kilometers from Moscow, usually in small country towns. There, they can continue previous occupations or professions but under the painful psychological endurance of isolation, discrimination, and arresting memories of prior identities and earlier lives. Cardiologist Osipov knows the circumstances well. His great-grandfather, a physician, was imprisoned as part of the fabricated conspiratorial Doctors' Plot (1951-53). The government attack was primarily against Jewish doctors from Moscow. On his release, Osipov's ancestor chose to live in Tarusa, which Osipov also chose, practicing there until finally immigrating to Germany to escape complicit involvement with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The brief opening, "Sventa: In Lieu of a Foreword," dedicated in memory of his parents, establishes the prominent, recurring themes of remembrance and home. During a book launch in Zarasai, Lithuania, Osipov recognizes everything. Things loved and lost generate melancholy reminiscences. He recalls an adolescent "maritime adventure" during a summer visit with a classmate. A two-story stone house and a "wooden, dilapidated bathhouse" that no longer exist. Two hundred thousand Lithuanian Jews buried in "shabby and sickly" forest ravines. Sventa, itself in Latvia, was a childhood side trip for picking blueberries and mushrooms. The six successive short stories underscore the varieties and consequences of exile (physical and emotional) and the enduring nature of compassion amidst emigration and death. In "Little Lord Fauntleroy," an empathetic visiting cardiologist in a Moscow suburb, which is "neither one thing nor the other," is accused of illegal organ transplantation. The lengthy, leisurely "Pieces on a Plane" details reflections of a translator on the death of his father in a country where patronyms determine identity. In "Cape Cod," a character who changes his surname feels parental responsibility and questions the "need [of] a homeland for something . . . But what?" Emigration becomes a "disaster, a mental illness." The brutal irony of the American Dream is that while avoiding Russian conscription, his son enters West Point to learn how to kill people. A psychiatrist in "Luxemburg" recounts the anti-Semitic vandalism and persecution a former schoolmate encounters in a small town after he retreats there and discovers the "life experience we gained in the Soviet Union prepared us only for life in the Soviet Union." A "chatty . . . unlicensed cabbie" extols "Big Opportunities" to a passenger seeking escape to freedom. In "The Whilst," a scholar in ancient languages and [End Page 83] cultures becomes attuned to the "separate and rather painful question . . . [of] the extended sleep of emigration." The four autobiographical essays ("My Native Land"; "A Sin to Complain"; "A Non-Easter Joy"; "The Children of Dzhankoy") reiterate the struggles exposed in the short fictions. Osipov lists positive and negative philosophical impressions of the "provincial life" as the resident physician in N. The bottom line is "Wherever you go, everything's the same. It's easy to see why we have such miserable lives and such a wonderful literature." Throughout—in fiction or nonfiction—Osipov deftly combines illuminating insights of modern Russia with the poignancies of emigrating. Robert Allen Papinchak Valley Village, California Copyright © 2023 World Literature Today and the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma

Disputes over Coal Mining and Gas Drilling in an Australian Country Town

This paper explores the repatterning of civil society, the social technologies of persuasion and information, and the role of socio-political contexts in Narrabri (an Australian country town, in Western New South Wales), and its surrounding region between 2018 and 2020. In Narrabri the consequences of Carbon Oligarchy are observed, as the oligarchy promoted new gas fields and expansions of a coal mine in the region. This expansion is justified by supposedly offering a solution to Narrabri’s apparent economic, agricultural and population decline problems, but for many local people, it worsens those problems. Conflict has been generated as a result, and the town has suffered painful fractures making the problems seem harder to solve because of the resulting disunity. The paper explores how the contest to justify the extraction also reduces the legitimacy of that extraction.

УЧЕНЬЕ – СВЕТ: ОРГАНИЗАЦИЯ РАБОТЫ ШКОЛ В ГОДЫ ВЕЛИКОЙ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ ВОЙНЫ (НА ПРИМЕРЕ ОМСКИХ ШКОЛ)

Education during the Great Patriotic War was one of the priorities in arrangement of everyday life of home front. Often local authorities came up against situations where the number of schoolchildren exceeded the capabilities of schools in country towns. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the way the educational process was arranged in a homefront town crowded with evacuated citizens. Based on the documentation of the historical archive of the Omsk region and the memoirs of war children, the author demonstrated the peculiarities of schools’ work under conditions of war and showed how the war had influenced the content of education and what impact it had on the reminiscences of war children.

Congregational Religious Trusts in Victoria's Churches of Christ

The leaders of 21st Century church organisations face the challenge of how to revitalise and rationalise their property holdings for contemporary usage while simultaneously respecting the history and sensibilities of congregations. In an increasingly secular society, many congregations have dwindling memberships and are no longer financially viable. The real estate portfolios amassed by Christian church movements and denominations, scattered around the metropolitan areas and country towns of Australia at prominent locations on main streets, are massively valuable. But who ‘owns’ the properties of churches in a religious denomination? Do the organising bodies of movements have the power to divest particular congregations of their church properties in service of the broader movement? These are questions that arouse passions and that have real contemporary significance for the 'business' of church. Answers differ depending on the characterisation of a church movement as hierarchical, presbyterian, or congregational. This article examines these questions by focusing on the case of the Churches of Christ in Victoria, a congregational movement whose properties are generally held under a variety of forms of trust. Relevant case law is reviewed. The implications of the history of the movement and its foundational principle of congregational autonomy are explained.

The Early Plays; The Middle Period Plays; The Late Plays

The Early Plays; The Middle Period Plays; The Late Plays

British Enlightenment Theatre: Dramatizing Difference

British Enlightenment Theatre: Dramatizing Difference

Barriers for Junior Doctors to Specialize in Rural Generalism – A Medical Student Experience

Australia is an exceptional country, with the majority of its population living on the Eastern Seaboard in highly urbanized, developed capital cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. However, more than seven million Australian’s live inland in some of the flattest, driest, and inhabitable regions on Earth.1 This provides unique challenges to Australia’s regional country towns, as they battle issues such as isolation, substandard health resources and poor welfare. Despite Australia’s world class healthcare system, unfortunately individual’s living in regional Australia, have health comparable to that of low and middle income countries.2 Government strategies have aimed to improve this through lackluster funding, empty promises, and ill-considered pathway strategies.

Theatre in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century: the troubled 1840s

The mid-nineteenth century was a challenging and turbulent time for Irish theatres, with the 1840s being particularly difficult. The period saw a growing demand for recreation which resulted in a surge of improvements in Irish theatre infrastructure and concerted efforts of theatre managers to attract the public by providing a wide range of entertainment in cities and country towns. Irish audiences had access to a broad repertoire that embraced everything from Shakespeare and high opera to rude farce and low comedy, while developments in transport ensured that internationally renowned performers were familiar to Irish theatre-goers to whom the theatre became increasingly accessible.

Urchin at War: The Tale of a Leipzig Rascal and his Lutheran Granny under Bombs in Nazi Germany by Uwe Siemon-Netto

Reviewed by: Urchin at War: The Tale of a Leipzig Rascal and his Lutheran Granny under Bombs in Nazi Germany by Uwe Siemon-Netto Robert Benne Urchin at War: The Tale of a Leipzig Rascal and his Lutheran Granny under Bombs in Nazi Germany. By Uwe Siemon-Netto. Irvine, California: 1517 Publishing, 2021. 286 pp. This remarkable memoir covers only the first eleven years of Uwe Siemon-Netto's life. Many Lutherans are aware of Siemon-Netto's work, The Fabricated Luther (1995), where he dispels the claims that Luther was to blame for the rise of Nazism. In that book he gave a few vignettes of his life as a child growing up in the war years. Happily, this engaging book, one of three planned, covers in colorful detail his early years in war-torn Leipzig. Given the daily bombing, it is a wonder that he lived to tell his story. The main story involves a rather distinguished anti-Nazi Lutheran family's struggle to survive the World War II years in Leipzig in the midst of daily bombings by the Allies, on the one hand, and intense Nazi pressures to conform, on the other. One word in the title—urchin—does indicate one truth illustrated richly: Uwe was a member of a kids' gang that did lots of rascally things, such as derailing trolleys. But there is quite another set of ingredients in his growing up. His father was a highly educated lawyer who was blinded in WWI. His mother was a budding concert singer. His grandmother, the central character in the book (besides the author), was a strong, well-educated, devout Lutheran, whose steady strength carried the whole family though those harrowing days. She was a real Mensch who calmly taught Luther's Catechism to Uwe as they took cover in the bomb shelters during the daily bombings. Uwe was brought up to appreciate Bach's music and Lutheran theology. Fine literature and art were part of the family's heritage. Uwe was hardly an ignorant street urchin, though he did have enough freedom to act like a naughty little boy. In their desire to protect Uwe from the bombs, his parents sent him to a country town to live with a Lutheran pastor and his family. What seemed like a good prospect turned out to be a nightmare of abuse and heresy. The pastor was an ardent Nazi who preached Nazi propaganda from the pulpit. He and his family ostracized and humiliated Uwe because he used French words and spoke high German. The memoir does depict vicious Nazis who affected their [End Page 243] lives, but spends more time on the many Germans—ordinary and extraordinary—who despised and resisted the Nazis in their own quiet yet dangerous ways. His experience of the war years is narrated by Siemon-Netto as he returns to visit and walk around his beloved Leipzig, now rebuilt and thriving. What is striking is his amazing recall of so many details of his early life. Certainly the dramatic—and frightening—experiences he had account for some of that recall. It is more likely, however, that he already possessed some of the gifts he needed to become the accomplished journalist that he became later in life. The book is a handsome and substantial one, replete with many pictures from that time. I found the book both edifying and entertaining. I eagerly await the sequels to his remarkable story. I recommend the book to all readers, but especially to Lutherans. Robert Benne Institute of Lutheran Theology Brookings, South Dakota Copyright © 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press and Lutheran Quarterly, Inc.

Frontier of Rural Revitalization in China: A Spatial Analysis of National Rural Tourist Towns

As the national economic situation improves, concerns about rural issues in China, a large agricultural country, are gradually increasing. Hence, rural tourism has been thrust into the limelight. This research is based on the National Rural Tourist Towns of China (NRTTC). It aims to analyze the spatial structure, influencing factors and their relevance to rural tourism development. Initially, this research examines the spatial distribution pattern in terms of kernel density. Subsequently, the imbalance index and Lorenz curve are used to distinguish the differences in spatial distribution. The Gini coefficient is used to explore the clustered regional distribution. The results indicate the following: (1) the number of NRTTC in each province is relatively even; and (2) the spatial distribution is highly uneven. The degree of aggregation is bounded by the Hu Huanyong boundary, with more in the southeast and less in the northwest. The capital circle is the core density area. Additionally, those NRTTC in the eastern and southeastern regions have a large distribution density and a more comprehensive radiation range. This study additionally analyzed the factors influencing the spatial distribution characteristics of NRTTC, and found four crucial aspects, namely, the national development strategy, the social environment, the geographical environment, and historical development. This research can provide a reference for the construction of rural tourist towns in different countries and regions.

Comparing local energy conflicts in NSW Australia: moving to climate generosity

ABSTRACT Australia does not have ‘carbon democracy', but a ‘carbon oligarchy,' in which the State defends the established and self-destructive relations of order, wealth and power built around fossil fuel energy. The article sketches interaction with carbon oligarchy in three NSW country towns of Lismore, Narrabri, and Bega, in relation to renewable energy. The aim is to uncover some problems of energy transition, and to suggest possible courses of action. In one town, a Local Council program to become self-supporting on renewables ran into problems of regulation and neoliberal economic values. In the second, transition was constrained by local fossil fuel supplies. In the third, some people embraced a form of ‘climate generosity’ which enabled support for transition against the requirements of carbon oligarchy. Climate generosity could usefully supplement Climate Justice, by circumventing demands for fairness and by providing an exemplar of action to help build community, support and meaning.

Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800-1917 by Anne Lounsbery

Reviewed by: Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800-1917 by Anne Lounsbery Muireann Maguire Life Is Elsewhere: Symbolic Geography in the Russian Provinces, 1800-1917. By Anne Lounsbery. (NIU Series in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2019. xi+344 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-15017-4792-2. Anne Lounsbery's monograph, complementing recent scholarship on the literary representation of Russian peasants and country gentry by Alexei Vdovin (in various articles) and Bella Grigoryan (in Noble Subjects: 'The Russian Novel and the Gentry, 1762–1861 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2018)) respectively, is a wide-ranging, occasionally provocative, survey of the concept of the provinces, and the nature of provincialism, in nineteenth-century Russian culture. She revisits familiar portraits of the provincial in works by Pushkin, Gogol′, Turgenev, Aksakov, Chekhov, and others, supplemented by comparisons with texts from less canonical or widely translated writers, including the Decembrist poet Kondratii Ryleev, the historical novelist Mikhail Zagoskin, Dostoevskii's contemporary Aleksei Pleshcheev, the so-called 'Russian Brontë' Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia, and Fedor Sologub (whose infamous 1907 novel The Petty Demon, with Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin's 1880 The Golovlev Family, plausibly implicates provincial life in a nexus of filth, futility, and doom). In shaping the terms of her study, and in looking forward to twentieth-century discourses of provinciality in the work of Andrei Platonov and others, Lounsbery cites Iurii Lotman's notion of negatively valued space and cultural theorist Pascale Casanova's schemata of centre and periphery. Even T. S. Eliot and Sarah Palin unexpectedly mingle in her informed and discursive introduction, which posits the idea that Russian intellectuals' perception of the land beyond the nation's two capitals as amorphous, uncouth, and ineducable was analogous to their fear that Russia, as a political and cultural entity, lagged behind Europe in precisely the same way. Over twelve chapters, which transition smoothly between well-known and obscure primary sources, Lounsbery introduces and reviews the main literary tropes for representing Russia's regions: remoteness and irrelevance, backwardness and even timelessness, unintelligibility, and immorality. This is absorbing material, but her examination of Russian writers' mostly negative self-scrutiny is even more revealing. In Chapter 6, for example, she notes that Turgenev's novels appear to describe a Casanovan binary between stolitsa (capital) and provintsiia, centre and periphery. But his characters cannot solve their dilemmas by exchanging one locale for another: those who study abroad, such as the scientist Bazarov (from the 1862 novel Fathers and Children) or the eponymous hero of the 1848 short story 'Hamlet of Shchigrov', mysteriously fail to thrive when they return to apply their new skills in Russia's provinces. Lounsbery suggests that provinciality is an inborn, inalienable quality that prevents country bumpkins from reinventing themselves as convincing cosmopolitans: 'Indeed, for many of Turgenev's characters, a Europeanizing education lies at the root of the most grievously damaging forms of provincialism' (p. 120). Discussing Chekhov's 'Geography of Meaninglessness' in Chapter 12, Lounsbery shows how—despite the playwright's famous representation of Moscow [End Page 318] as a locus of progress and personal redemption in Three Sisters (1900)—much of his fiction hints that provincial stigma can taint Moscow too. Russia's capital, despite its promises to the contrary, may occupy the same continuum of meaninglessness and insignificance as Chekhov's many nameless country towns and decaying gentry estates. But Chekhov acknowledges (as Gogol′ does not) 'the possibility of change and movement' (p. 227); his Russia is backward but not static, and thus potentially capable of moving forward through time. One of Lounsbery's own most useful advances is in Chapter 7, focused on the provintsialki—provincial lady writers who published on marginal themes and created the subgenre which Catriona Kelly has termed 'the provincial tale' (p. 143). Sometimes the provincial tale was a female Bildungsroman, sometimes an 'escape plot' involving marriage or some other means of flight from indefinite rustication (p. 143). Lounsbery discusses the work of Elena Gan (whose early death caused her to be glamorized by male peers as a Romantic heroine in her own right); Maria Zhukova (a proponent of literary realism whose characters are markedly, and...

Common Purpose

The relationship between performance and curation has shift ed. A new attitude of fluid and pragmatic alliance has evolved as the sense of an essential antagonism between performance and curation recedes and the two fields discover a shared focus on aspects of social engagement and agency. This article considers an Australian socially engaged art project, the Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA), which meshes curatorial and artistic practices in its efforts to reimagine and reanimate the future of a small country town. Employing a wide range of strategies, KSCA works closely with the local community to facilitate collective memory, reflection and social and environmental transformation. Deliberately avoiding traditional lines of artistic and institutional tension, KSCA employs an impure and inclusive approach that is emblematic of emerging forms of activist contemporary art.

Master of Her Craft: Margaret Wild

Master of Her Craft: Margaret Wild Robyn Sheahan-Bright (bio) Australian writer Margaret Wild was short-listed in the 2022 Hans Christian Andersen Awards, to the delight of her compatriots. In her more than one hundred books for children and young adults, she has attracted universal acclaim for her splendid, highly layered writing, which is spare and yet suggestively complex. In books that canvas a wide range of challenging topics, her respect for young readers, and her unwillingness to shield children from uncomfortable truths, have been paramount. She is one of Australia’s most revered picturebook creators, and this acknowledgment has cemented her international reputation. Click for larger view View full resolution Background Margaret Wild became a full-time writer in 2000, after a career as a journalist, freelance writer, and publisher. Born in Eshowe, a country town in South Africa, on April 24, 1948, she moved frequently in her early life, since her father was a bank manager, but she grew up mainly in Johannesburg, where she attended local state schools. As a child, she was a voracious reader, and also loved drawing. After working as a journalist on country and city newspapers, she immigrated to Australia in 1973 and worked as a feature writer on Dolly magazine. She then completed her formal education at the Australian National University in Canberra. Returning to Sydney in 1980, she combined the rearing of two children with freelance writing for newspapers and magazines. In 1983, she began writing for children, inspired by the reactions of her son to children’s books. She combined her own writing career with managing and commissioning children’s books for sixteen years with a range of publishers, including Omnibus Books, ABC Books, Methuen, and Angus & Robertson. In 1984, she published her first book, There’s a Sea in My Bedroom, illustrated by Jane Tanner. Wild has said: “I feel very lucky to be a writer. As long as I have pen and paper, I can write anywhere, anytime—for me, it’s the best job in the world.” (“Margaret Wild”). Body of Work Wild has that rare capacity to speak to a wide range of ages in her picture-book texts, whether they be for babies or teenagers. Her rhythmical books for babies, her lyrical picturebooks for beginning readers, and her complex visual works for older readers demonstrate a virtuoso control of voice that few other writers could master. They resonate with tenderness, love, and comfort. Although Wild is best known for her picturebooks, her [End Page 38] work has also included junior novels, short stories, two groundbreaking verse novels—Jinx (2001), which has been translated into nine languages, and One Night (2003)—and one prose novel for young adults, The Vanishing Moment (2013). In these impressive long-form works, she explored teenage emotions in an empathetic and highly immediate way. This poem might be viewed as her statement of intent as a writer: Click for larger view View full resolution Jen’s Mum Will Write Jen’s mum writes advertising copy.She specializes in white goods:washing machines, dryers, fridges,freezers, dishwashers.She hates these applianceshulkingin corners,power-hungry and fractious.One day, she will have a wood stove,and she’ll write about things that mattershe will write about birth and death,about love and the absence of love,about fathers and children,about mothers and daughters,about lovers and friends.She’ll write about the whole goddamnwonderful, awful businessof loving and being loved —Margaret Wild, Jinx Click for larger view View full resolution Craftsperson Her exquisitely crafted, spare use of language is poetic: With Fox, she brings a poet’s sensibility to the writing of a mesmerising and powerful work about the elemental need for companionship in our lives. Her writing bristles with urgent action and sings with suggestive imagery; it is pared back, sometimes playful, and always emotionally resonant. In this way, it carries the very essence of what the story is about—the arcane battle between innocence and evil, kindness and cruelty, love and hate. (Sheahan-Bright) Her inventive playfulness with language in Fox (2000) was also demonstrated in the graphic dystopian thriller Woolvs in the...

Small shrinking towns in the post-socialist context of development

The process of urban shrinkage is affecting many cities around the world. It is evident in small towns as well, but unlike larger cities, it has not received much attention. Accordingly, this paper analyses small towns? shrinking focusing on post-socialist context of development, which led to new patterns of urban shrinkage in countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). After discussing the specific characteristics of the shrinkage of small towns, their paths of development in different CEE countries are analyzed, in order to highlight the characteristics of urban shrinkage and the influence of post-socialist transition on this process. Thereafter, the shrinkage of small towns in Serbia is analyzed in order to determine whether the identified characteristics are recognized in them and to single out the specifics of that process in relation to other post-socialist countries. Based on the general characteristics of the development and shrinkage of small towns in the CEE countries, it can be concluded that shrinking small towns are not equally represented in all countries, and there are certain differences in terms of dynamics and intensity of shrinkage. The results of the analysis indicate that the previous path of development had a strong influence on their shrinkage after the post-socialist transformation. Three general trajectories of socialist development have been singled out, which influenced different patterns of urban shrinkage. In Serbia, it has also been observed that the shrinkage of small towns is directly related to the unfavourable direction of the urbanization process during socialist development.