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Focusing on our project title/research question, our aim is to transmit people’s stories by creating an immersive experience that helps to comprehend their situation and manage to prevent any prior bias. To be able to create this, our starting point will be to investigate, listen and understand ourselves the emotions and feelings behind each one, in order to get insights that help us to transmit their experiences in the most accurate manner. It will be after a detailed investigation that we will be able to choose the most suitable tool to achieve our goal with VR, a film or an inanimate object.

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1. Find the stories. As mentioned before, our starting point will be to investigate, listen and understand the emotions and feelings behind every story. First, it will be, to reach those stories that made us focus on this research question. Discuss them and see which ones we can focus on.

2. Qualitative and quantitative research. Investigate, collect and analyze concepts and experiences with the help of articles, books and data. In the same process, investigate those organisations that can help us to make contact with people who can support us for our next step.

3. Focus groups and interviews. When these stories come into focus, the next step is to hear them from those who have experienced them. With interviews and surveys, we will be able to get the insights that maybe we couldn’t find during our first research. As well as their personal journeys and thoughts that help us to understand more about their experience.

4. Experimental research. Having a clearer understanding of our research, as well as the time we have to achieve it. We will choose the most appropriate tool to convey our objective to then conduct experiments with the audience, as well as feedback from the persons represented.

5. Collaborating with experts. This step will most likely go very closely related to the previous one and will serve to both; seek expert advice for the development of our piece if necessary. As well as feedback from other peers on the objective of the piece.

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2bt3,
Firstly, their theme is well chosenUncontrollable Ageing, ageing is indeed an inevitable event in each of our lives. Especially now that the birth rate is declining, the issue of an ageing population is a social issue that we need to take seriously. The research on the current UK ageing population is backed up by strong data and forecasts for the future based on the data. The implications of the ageing population are then presented as part of the research and this is part of what we can think about.

It is also interesting to think about the impact of the ageing population on the elderly themselves. But how to improve this through a project is very difficult, perhaps they are trying to call attention to the problem and care for the elderly. Ageing is such a broad and inevitable thing that it would be too broad to be improved through a project or a product. 2BT3 raises a lot of questions about the impact of ageing on society, the impact on the elderly and the question of whether people really want to live longer and the fact that most older people don't have access to electronics. I think extensive research upfront is necessary. The team interviewed their own grandparents, which was a good first-hand, preliminary research. I think this is a very human point. Perhaps they wanted to refine their project entry point from the research. It was very visual and powerful to show the elderly's ailments in a graphical way, in particular.

I think Uncontrollable Ageing is a social care topic and it is very necessary for the team to focus on and improve the physical and mental health of the ageing population, which is a positive intervention. I think the team's questionnaire is a bit too broad and should be set in a context, or I suggest that the team could use experiential interviews, such as going through their day with some elderly people and using observation to find out what difficulties the ageing population is experiencing in their lives. This is something that is difficult to observe through questionnaire research. Some elderly people are not very good at expressing themselves or are too shy to do so, and a direct questionnaire survey may cause secondary psychological damage to the elderly group. At the same time the team could document the difficult lives of the elderly in the form of a documentary to help people understand and care more about the problems of the elderly. Also this would allow the team to pay attention to more details.

I think we can continue to look at the elderly's reluctance to disturb their children, their choice of lifestyle and their fear of physical ageing. Then we could try to alleviate the psychological problems of the elderly through art therapy.

It is positive that the team members have a clear division of labour and functions. It can improve efficiency and motivate progress. Also the fact that each person is responsible for a different part can be combined with different areas to develop new products is a good part.

Finally I hope they can try something in other directions to explore more possibilities. To sum up, it was a good choice of topic, we had a lot of content to work on and the team members clearly explained with strong research and exploration why they wanted to do research on ageing. Very much looking forward to seeing their subsequent progress.

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T2
The speaker's speech is audible and understandable to the audience. The speech flows easily, and the paragraph transitions are smooth.The main points of the topic are covered in the entire speech. Additionally, it is comprehensible using facts and references, and the overall color scheme of the ppt is well -coordinated.  Two examples were used in the speech: Nadia Lee Cohen's "Hello, my name is.." and Julie hollenbach and Robin Alex McDonal's "Feelings, Objects, Altars" are very appropriate themes.They plan to conduct extensive research, use a pinhole camera to interview random bystanders, record their most honest and open thoughts, and then combine those thoughts. Since I've seen videos like these, I believe the use of a pinhole camera is practical. However, make sure to obtain the subject's consent before ending the recording. They can interview people in various street settings and neighborhoods who are of various races, ages, and emotional states (in love, married, divorced, widowed, etc.). Each of them has unique perspectives, cultural backgrounds, and social and life experiences. Take pictures of the entire process, choose the best examples, and create a video.
T3
First of all, a very relevant topic is brought up: aging. In the previous section, there is a detailed explanation of the data. A clear and powerful perspective on the aging process. As well as explaining the superficial changes that age brings, it also explains the intrinsic changes that age brings. As a result of these two cases, the difficulties associated with aging in modern society can also be seen. The team members were very close to real life, and interviewed the elderly in their own families, gave examples and gave feedback. More oral interviews can be added to the research, and it can be filmed as a documentary. Considering the inconveniences of the elderly, Internet and written research will cause trouble to them; the results of the research are presented. Examples from real life are given. The students in this group have a clear division of labor. Each person is responsible for a different section, and can combine different fields to expand and discover new products. Finally, I hope they can actually innovate easier products that are more suitable for the elderly. In summary, it is a good topic. Aging is an inevitable problem in modern society. The members of this group clearly explained the research on aging in language and PPT and some targeted solutions.

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Reflections and Implications for the Field
Download:
Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities (3.9 Mb)

Spaces in which arts and cultural activity happen are often the pulse points of communities. At their best, they are places in which artists, tradition-bearers and cultural workers are in charge. They are places in which people gather; curiosity is piqued; world views are challenged or affirmed; preservation and innovation are fostered; creativity and imagination are stoked; intellect, critical thinking, and compassion are expanded; and people find inspiration that leads to a more generative society. These places can also help to create a community's identity and promote stewardship among residents and stakeholders. Art spaces can stimulate civic engagement, and affect economic conditions directly and indirectly. While art spaces are important in all communities, they can be especially significant in low- and moderate-income communities that are striving to improve the quality of life of and opportunities for residents.

This essay distills important issues to consider in the creation of artist-driven spaces, primarily those in marginalized communities. It begins with a brief background discussion of the space development process and why artists work in marginalized communities. This is followed by a discussion of considerations related to

1. organizational structures and resources,

2. purpose and leadership,

3. site selection

4. relationships with residents and other stakeholders, and

5. sustainability and implications for the field.

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Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities

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Reflections and Implications for the Field Download: Developing Artist-Driven Spaces in Marginalized Communities (3.9 Mb) Spaces in which arts and cultural activity happen are often the pulse points of communities. At their best, they are places in which artists, tradition-bearers and cultural workers are in charge.

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Eight students working in six countries have developed powerful activist research initiatives in their local communities, highlighting issues of diversity and discrimination.
In an ambitious project, undergraduate students from the faculties of Arts and Humanities and Social Science and Public Policy at Kings College London, were partnered with community researchers to identify issues of marginalisation or exclusion in their local areas.

Funded by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, the students were supported through training and mentorship, provided by The Young Foundation's Institute for Community Studies (ICS).

Undisciplined Spaces saw students engage with issues in communities across six different countries and produce everything from photography and films to zines, policy briefs, visual art, and books to display their findings. The programme gave students a unique opportunity to develop their skills and gain experience in community research while making a meaningful positive impact in their local communities.

Many students were motivated to explore issues that were personal to them and that reflected their experiences. Through interviews and visual storytelling, Martina Chen (BA European Politics) investigated the racism, marginalisation, and emancipation experienced by the Chinese community in Prato, Italy. Her findings were summarised in an impactful and emotive participatory film (available to view on YouTube) that aims to, "meaningfully connect with the community, amplify community voices and experiences, and produce collective knowledge that can empower the community and increase civic engagement and social mobilisation."

Thanks to Undisciplined Spaces, I am now more confident about pursuing a career in research and further exploring community research in the future. [...] The programme has taught me important research skills and practices that are rarely taught at university or emphasised in traditional research, such as compassion, empathy and sensitivity. These are practices that I will definitely be incorporating in my future projects.

- Martina Chen, BA European Politics

Sameera Mohammed (BA English) focused on a topic close to home as she investigated issues of diversity and representation in higher education by interviewing fellow Arts and Humanities students from London universities. She used infographics to highlight how students feel silenced, including direct quotes from her interviews because, as she put it, "Voices of these people are the most important if you want to make change."

Also drawing from the familiar world of higher education, Laura Maxwell (BA History) explored young people's experiences of mental health and isolation in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and restrictions.

My project stemmed from the frustration I felt for marginalised students who don't know what they're capable of[...] to encourage them to know their worth, realise their potential, and do their best to take every opportunity they can.

- Sameera Mohammed, BA English

Many of the students saw this programme as an opportunity to shape and inform local policy. After conducting one-to-one interviews online and via telephone, Carolin Klein (BA Political Economy) produced a policy proposal to advise local authorities on the integration struggles of female refugees in Germany.

"The aim of the study was to give a voice to the marginalised group of refugee women, presenting them as active agents for change while demanding policy action to recognise their unique struggles," she said.

Carolin also reflected on her own role in the project and the community: "The programme helped me use my privilege for good. In collecting data on the needs of refugee women in a policy paper, I could amplify the voice of a marginalised community, finding my role as an ally."

Also interested in public policy, ByeongKyu Jun (BA International Relations) researched how homeless people find and receive available resources and support, using Whitechapel, London, as a case study. After carrying out a survey in conjunction with local charities, ByeongKyu produced a small card that details relevant support for homeless people. He highlighted how in public policy as well as in his studies, community experience is often side-lined but, through Undisciplined Spaces, he was able to gain a new perspective on the importance of lived experience in policymaking. As he put it, "While I always focused on big actors in the international community in my studies, I started to see more diverse - smaller or often unheard - voices in our society [...] The programme indeed made me consider wider perspectives."

It was fantastic to work with King's College London on Undisciplined Spaces, co-creating a pioneering programme of creative, activist research projects. The event showcased some inspiring student-led projects, highlighting the value of peer research, which we promote and support via our Peer Research Network. Through Undisciplined Spaces, students around the world demonstrate the power and potential of community research, connecting young people with issues that matter in their communities.

- Emily Morrison, Head of The Young Foundation's Institute for Community Studies

Other student projects focused on local communities in London, including one by Saffron Brown Davis (BA French & Philosophy), which shared experiences of people affected by displacement in Brixton in a zine. Also in London, Rebecca Lindsay (BA Philosophy and Spanish) conducted one-to-one interviews to explore the gentrification of the Latinx community in Elephant and Castle.

For more information about the Undisciplined Spaces project, visit: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/the-institute-of-community-studies-undis...
If you would like to speak to the Institute for Community Studies about carrying out a similar project, please contact emily.morrison@icstudies.org.uk
The student projects:

Afra Fathibitaraf (BA English), Leaves in the Wind: Stories of Iranian-Canadians in Toronto

ByeongKyu Jun (BA International Relations), Exploring understanding of homelessness and the accessibility of support services for people experiencing homelessness in Whitechapel

Carolin Klein (BA Political Economy), The Gendered Problem of Migration: A Policy Proposal for Integration in Germany

Laura Maxwell (BA History), Exploring young people's experiences of mental health and isolation against the backdrop of Covid-19 restrictions

Martina Chen (BA European Politics), Understanding Collective Action in the Chinese community of Prato

Rebecca Lindsay (BA Philosophy and Spanish), Elephant & Castle: A tale of gentrification

Saffron Brown Davis (BA French and Philosophy), A community Influx: Perspectives on displacement in Brixton

Sameera Mohammed (BA English), We are Here: ethnic minority experiences of Arts and Humanities courses in higher education

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Exploring marginalisation with 'compassion and empathy'

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Eight students working in six countries have developed powerful activist research initiatives in their local communities, highlighting issues of diversity and discrimination. In an ambitious project, undergraduate students from the faculties of Arts and Humanities and Social Science and Public Policy at Kings College London, were partnered with community researchers to identify issues of marginalisation or exclusion in their local areas.

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Group Exhibition: Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA, November 17, 2022- March 12, 2023

Group Exhibition: Hot Concrete, K11 Musea, Hong Kong, October 20- November 13, 2022

Group Exhibition: Nightmare Bathroom, Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles, CA, September 24- December 10, 2022

Group Exhibition: Press Release, Storage, New York, NY, September 9- December 18, 2022

sulafbermudez@gmail.com

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Group Exhibition: Fabric of a Nation: American Quilt Stories, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA, November 17, 2022- March 12, 2023 Group Exhibition: Hot Concrete, K11 Musea, Hong Kong, October 20- November 13, 2022 Group Exhibition: Nightmare Bathroom, Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles, CA, September 24- December 10, 2022 Group Exhibition: Press Release, Storage, New York, NY, September 9- December 18, 2022 sulafbermudez@gmail.com

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Slapping Noises
FIGURE FOUR, BALTIC 39 NEWCASTLE 2017
Photo Credit: Colin Davison

Sexy Beach
commissioned by Modern Cultures
performance at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, part of the 'Emotional Resources' symposium 2014

Slapping Noises
FIGURE FOUR, BALTIC 39 NEWCASTLE 2017
Photo Credit: Colin Davison

In Praise of Shadows - with Rhodri Davies, Paul Dunmall, Chris Greive, Impossibility Knox, Mark Sanders, Nicola Singh and Sue Tompkins / commissioned by Wunderbar Festival, NEWCASTLE 2013 / Photo Credit: 4130 Photography

In Praise of Shadows
Photo Credit: 4130 Photography

Exercise with 'the feminist reading group', organised by Nadia Hebson, Northern Charter, NEWCASTLE 2016
Photo Credit: Susie Green

Exercise with 'the feminist reading group', organised by Nadia Hebson, Northern Charter, NEWCASTLE 2016
Photo Credit: Susie Green

You're Torturing Me David. Torture Me So I Can Learn, New Art Centre, BOSTON USA, 2016
Drawings for original costume

Photo Credit: Janina Sabaliauskaite

email: perform.nsingh@gmail.com / instagram: nicolasingh
Based in Newcastle upon Tyne UK.

'Don't look so sad' (2020)
commissioned as part of PRINT PRESENT PERFORM
The Tetley Gallery, Leeds
Photo: Jules Lister

'Don't look so sad' (2020)
commissioned as part of Pre-Ramble
David Dale Gallery, Glasgow
Photo: Isobel Lutz Smith

[from left to right]
'Comparing forearms with Rach and Kate' (2021)
'Finding a voice by Amrit Wilson' (2021)
'Speaking Aloud' (2021)
pen, pencil and oil pastel on inkjet print-outs (27 x 19cm)

Exhibited as part of group show 'Dark Matter', Workplace Foundation, Newcastle (2021)
Image Credit: John McKenzie

'Dark Matter', Workplace Foundation, Newcastle (2021)
Image Credit: John McKenzie

'Dark Matter', Workplace Foundation, Newcastle (2021)
Image Credit: John McKenzie

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Slapping Noises FIGURE FOUR, BALTIC 39 NEWCASTLE 2017 Photo Credit: Colin Davison Sexy Beach commissioned by Modern Cultures performance at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, part of the 'Emotional Resources' symposium 2014 Slapping Noises FIGURE FOUR, BALTIC 39 NEWCASTLE 2017 Photo Credit: Colin Davison In Praise of Shadows - with

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Rehema Chachage – Visual Artist – Rehema Chachage official website

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-A very noteworthy theme with very clear and unambiguous points of view.
-Comprehensive research, with the addition of real-life examples from their family members.
-Focused more on verbal form of questioning, could have been recorded by filming, taking into account that the elderly are not comfortable using the internet or paper form of research.
-How to engage the audience, immersive experience
-The division of labor is clear, combining different areas of expertise to create something new
-Create some professional-related devices, innovative forms to replace some common objects representing the elderly.
-Concerns about time, the scale of the project
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-Great Illustraions
-traditional/ old school method of documentation
-Archive of objects and using storytelling as a medium to convey care
- realising we practice caring everyday with simple objects
- levels of care vs necessity of objects
-to remind yourself everything is care
-idea of everyday objects you carry reflect your personality or who you are
-ethical reason to approach people on the streets. How can you ask verbal or written consent from them?
-what can we bring from our nationality and how can we analyse the data.

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Malnutrition in children affects their educational development

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Malnutrition in children affects their educational development

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The budding strongman has ridden Bitcoin schemes and a repressive crackdown on gangs to become Latin America's most popular leader.

Content

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El Penalito, the little jail, is a squat concrete structure on a busy commercial street in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador. On the morning of April 7th, a Thursday, fifty women were lined up along its front wall, wearing surgical masks and holding umbrellas against the sun. They'd been gathering there all week. It was nine-thirty, and about ninety degrees. Most of the women had been waiting since eight to reach a small window where a police official shared information on the whereabouts of their sons and husbands.

Toward the back of the line, wearing a long denim skirt and a red T-shirt, was a middle-aged woman with dark, lined skin and deep-set eyes. Her name was Yanira, and her son, she said, was a twenty-year-old with autism. He'd been arrested three days earlier, at home, where the two had been working throughout the pandemic, cleaning and reselling discarded plastic sleeves that hold bottles of hand sanitizer. Yanira rarely leaves him alone, but she had to run an errand. When she returned, thirty minutes later, the police had taken him away. "Sometimes he'll wander into the street without his shoes," she told me. "All the neighbors know him. But someone who doesn't might think he's a criminal, or crazy."

A week before, members of El Salvador's largest gang, MS-13, had murdered eighty-seven people in three days. The country has long been ravaged by gang violence, but these killings were unusual in their ruthlessness. People with no ties to crime were targeted: a fruit seller, a surf instructor, a homemaker, a cobbler. The gangsters went after everybody, but their message was directed at one person-the country's President, Nayib Bukele, who has promised to radically reduce crime and to change El Salvador's image abroad. Gang members left a corpse on the road leading to Surf City, a stretch of beachfront real estate on the Pacific Coast which Bukele had refurbished and renamed to attract international tourists.

In recent decades, every Salvadoran President has contended with the gangs. One administration sent soldiers to poor neighborhoods and filled the country's prisons, under a policy it called mano dura, or "strong hand"; another reprised it as super mano dura. When Bukele was the mayor of San Salvador, he called these responses "immoral" and "impractical." But now he declared war. Just after midnight on the second day of the homicide spike, the National Assembly, which Bukele's party controls, instituted a "state of exception," under which authorities could arrest anyone they considered suspicious. Detainees were not entitled to a legal defense. The right to gather in groups larger than two was suspended, and all minors would be tried as adults. On his Twitter account, Bukele, who is forty-one years old and has an approval rating of more than eighty per cent, shared a running tally of the arrests that followed, along with scabrous commentary, posting photographs of tattooed men in handcuffs and underwear ("little angels"), some of whom appeared to have been roughed up ("He must have been eating fries with ketchup"). Critics of the new policy-whether common citizens, journalists, or foreign governments-supported "the terrorists," he wrote.

Yanira's son was one of six thousand people arrested in the first week. By the time I met her, the total had risen to about nine thousand. A month and a half later, it would reach thirty thousand. Bukele conceded that one per cent of the roundups might result in wrongful arrests, but the public could only take his word for that figure. "As we continue arresting more gangsters, more people are going to protest," Bukele said. "Because there will always be a mother of a gangster, a family member, or a friend who isn't going to like that we are cleansing that cancer."

Yanira was joined in the line by her daughter, who'd been missing work at a clothing shop to help locate her brother. The previous day, the daughter told me, they'd spent six hours visiting courthouses, searching for him. "We're not the kind of people who have any experience in these sorts of places," she said. She crossed the street while Yanira held their place in line. A bodega in front of El Penalito offers food and hygiene packages for detainees, ranging from a single meal ($2.50) to basic toiletries ($7.00) or a change of underwear ($15.50). (Prisoners without this assistance eat only intermittently.) Yanira's daughter returned just in time to press a receipt for three meals into her mother's hand before they reached the window. Farther down the block, a group of soldiers armed with rifles had stopped a public bus and were ordering the male passengers to step out and lift up their shirts. They were checking for tattoos that might indicate gang membership.

As the official at the window examined her son's records, Yanira stood ramrod straight. Suddenly, she recoiled; when she turned away from the window, her eyes were wide. "Izalco" was all she could say, and she staggered off, sobbing. It was the name of a maximum-security prison that houses hardened gangsters. Her son had been sent there earlier that morning.

While the women waited outside El Penalito, another crowd was gathering, at the Miami Beach Convention Center. It consisted of investors and tech entrepreneurs, who were there to see Bukele, a keynote speaker at an annual Bitcoin conference. Last summer, he announced that El Salvador would be the first country in the world to accept bitcoin as legal tender. Within a few months, there were some two hundred special A.T.M.s set up across the country, and the government had launched an app, called the Chivo Wallet, on which each Salvadoran was given thirty dollars' worth of bitcoin. At the conference, Bitcoiners, techno-utopians, and libertarians assembled to hear about a series of ambitious projects that Bukele had been promising ever since. They would have to wait a little longer. The conference, Bukele wrote in an apologetic note, was "one of the biggest celebrations of the power of freedom, decentralization, and human ingenuity in its fight against ignorance, centralization, and dogma." But, owing to the state of exception, he needed to stay put. "Everything happens for a reason," he went on. "Hopefully we'll be able to learn soon why this had to happen this way."

When Bukele was elected President, in 2019, he was the youngest head of state in Latin America and embodied a new national beginning. At his inauguration, his heavily pregnant wife stood beside him as he instructed crowds of ecstatic voters to raise a hand along with him after he swore the oath of office. Three of his recent predecessors had been either arrested or indicted, and all of them came from El Salvador's two main political parties, which had governed without interruption for more than two decades. It had been a period of chronic poverty, violence, and mass emigration. "If you left to live in the United States and returned twenty years later, you'd find the same politicians," Amparo Marroquín, a professor at the Central American University, in San Salvador, told me. "They were dinosaurs." Bukele, who'd defected from one of the main parties, pitched himself as an anti-corruption reformer. His campaign slogan-"There's enough money to go around as long as no one steals"-is a line that he has used for almost as long as he's been in public life. He began his career at the age of thirty, as the mayor of a town of fewer than ten thousand people. After a single term, he ran for mayor of San Salvador. Fresh off that job, at thirty-seven, he was elected President.

Bukele, who wears leather jackets and backward baseball caps and has a beard, invokes Alexander the Great and Steve Jobs, and his brand is meant to be a bit of both: a potentate with an anti-establishment streak. At the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, he took a selfie from the dais, mid-address, reminding the world leaders in attendance that a "couple of images on Instagram can have a greater impact than any speech in this assembly." Social media, he once said, "has shown us what people really are." Before, "everybody was pretending."

During the years of his ascent, the public heard from him constantly-on Twitter and Facebook, and in a continual procession of ribbon cuttings and other public appearances. As the mayor of San Salvador, he cleaned up parts of the city's ramshackle downtown; renovated a trio of historic plazas; opened a high-end market, which has escalators and rooftop restaurants, in addition to a library equipped with computers and play areas for children. At one point, he unveiled a twenty-four-million-dollar public-works project, called 100% Iluminado, to install lamps on every street corner. "You can call it PR if you want to be a little cynical. But I'm talking about inspiration," he told the Virginia Quarterly Review, in 2016. "I'm talking about something sublime."

Usually, public adoration dims as the realities of governing set in, but Bukele's support has grown. He is now the most popular leader in Latin America. In part, this is the result of his war on the gangs, his handling of the pandemic, public-infrastructure projects, an increase in the minimum wage, and low gas prices. It is also the product of a mammoth propaganda campaign. But, more profoundly, Bukele has succeeded in generating a palpable sense of collective expectancy and pride: the country is finally getting its act together.

The United States, the European Union, and the Organization of American States have criticized Bukele's most audacious acts as President. These include threatening members of Congress with troops, and firing Supreme Court magistrates and replacing them with judges who have allowed Bukele to run for a second term despite a constitutional ban. But the foreign criticism has enabled Bukele to unify Salvadorans against a common enemy, and has put him, and his country of six and a half million people, on the map. "Why are they so concerned about a country so small?" he has said. In 2021, Time included Bukele in its list of the world's most influential people, alongside Narendra Modi, Donald Trump, and Naftali Bennett. "Ok boomers," he recently tweeted, in English, at members of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "You have 0 jurisdiction on a sovereign and independent nation. We are not your colony."

For much of his career, Bukele has basked in the limelight of the press: visits to Washington, to address the Americas Society and the Heritage Foundation, interviews with Jorge Ramos and Ben Smith. When the coverage turned critical, however, he stopped engaging with international journalists. I was no exception. As one of his advisers put it, "Why talk to you when he can speak directly to the people?"

Bukele may represent the future, but he talks a lot about the past-the politicians who robbed public coffers, the gangs that sowed terror, the institutions that never worked. "It's a kind of revanchism," Juan Antonio Durán, a judge, told me. He was demoted last year, after criticizing the President for forcing a third of the federal judiciary into early retirement. By then, at least fifty government officials and high-profile critics had had to leave the country, according to Revista Factum, a Salvadoran news magazine. Bukele, after many accusations that he was concentrating power, changed his Twitter bio to "the coolest dictator in the world." A member of his party identified himself on social media as "Minister of Trolls." Bukele's voters expected him to have enemies, a member of Congress told me. "What the President is selling the people is revenge."

All through the nineteen-eighties, El Salvador was a place of obsessive U.S. interest. Ronald Reagan said that it was "on the front line of the battle that is really aimed at the very heart of the Western Hemisphere, and eventually at us." When fighting broke out between the country's right-wing government and leftist guerrillas, the U.S. sided with the government; it armed the military, trained and advised its officer corps, and covered up their worst abuses. For twelve years, the guerrillas fought the U.S.-backed government to a stalemate, and some seventy-five thousand civilians died. Eighty-five per cent of the killings were committed by the military and the security forces, which massacred large numbers of the rural poor for sympathizing with the guerrillas. Bukele was ten when peace accords were signed, in 1992. Nearly a quarter of the Salvadoran population ended up moving to the United States.

Bukele grew up in San Salvador, as a privileged outsider. His father was a Muslim businessman of Palestinian descent, who opened the country's first McDonald's franchise, ran a textile company, helped build four mosques, and owned a public-relations firm. He was also a polygamist with six wives. Bukele, who has three brothers and seven half siblings, went to a bilingual private school. Most of his well-heeled classmates shared their families' conservative outlooks. But Bukele's father was a man of the left and a supporter of the guerrilla forces, called the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, or the F.M.L.N., which became one of the two major political parties after the war. Muslim leftists stood out in Salvadoran high society. In the late nineties, after Al Qaeda gained international notoriety, the Bukele family was stopped by customs agents at the airport because of their suspicious-sounding name, according to a deep investigative profile by the journalist Gabriel Labrador. If the incident rattled Bukele, he refused to let on. Popular enough to be elected president of his high-school class, he captioned his yearbook photograph "Class terrorist."

Bukele's political apprenticeship began after he dropped out of college and was managing a night club in downtown San Salvador. He took over his family's public-relations firm, whose key client was the F.M.L.N. The Presidency and the Assembly were controlled by the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista, or ARENA, which was founded, in the early eighties, by a member of a right-wing death squad. The Party catered primarily to the business élite, but its members included ex-military men and religious conservatives. An accumulation of corruption scandals sank ARENA, in 2009, allowing the F.M.L.N. to gain power, which it held on to for the next decade. In 2011, Bukele launched a self-funded bid for mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, an old ARENA stronghold outside the capital. "Don't get involved in politics," his father had once warned him, according to an interview recovered by the investigative newspaper El Faro. "Politicians who lose are . . . thrown away. You'll be damaged goods."

But Bukele already had a plan: he would run on the F.M.L.N. ticket while downplaying his associations with the Party. "I did not live the war," he said in a television interview during the campaign. "I'm of the postwar generation, a generation that has new ideas." His politics were leftist-progressive taxes, increased public spending-but he avoided the F.M.L.N.'s hoary pronouncements about revolution. He also rejected the Party's trademark colors of red and white, instead blanketing the streets with campaign materials that featured his name in white against a backdrop of light blue. "I have friends who are conservative, and they'd never vote for the F.M.L.N.," he told one of his advisers.

Bukele won by less than two per cent, and governed as if he were still campaigning. He erected a large stone sign with a white "N" engraved in a circle at the entrance to Nuevo Cuscatlán. He also opened a twenty-four-hour medical clinic, a library, and a community center. Each month, seniors received a free basket of food. Bukele vowed to donate his entire salary to a new program funding grants for students to take classes in English and computer science. The town's debt ballooned, but his popularity soon eclipsed that of the Party elders.

The F.M.L.N. encouraged him to run for mayor of San Salvador, a job widely seen as a stepping stone to the Presidency. "The leader of the Party told everyone that Nayib's candidacy would get us two or three more seats in Congress," a former Party official told me. "They all thought that it would help them."

Bukele, who felt his power growing, shut the Party out of his campaign, relying instead on family members and old friends. One of them was Ernesto Castro, his chief secretary in Nuevo Cuscatlán, who now serves as the president of the National Assembly. Another was his younger brother Karim. In public, Nayib was polished and poised, but in private meetings he tended to be distracted and jittery. He checked his phone constantly, drank four Red Bulls a day, kept odd hours, and struggled to focus on individual tasks. A former associate told me, "If an idea occurs to him, and he thinks it's brilliant, he does it. Then, afterward, if it's illegal? Oops!" Karim would sit quietly before making calm, authoritative pronouncements. "It wasn't a meeting unless Karim was there," the former Party official said. Together, the brothers reprised the high points of the Nuevo Cuscatlán campaign-the same colors, the same insignia ("N"), and the same slogan ("New Ideas"). By the time Bukele won, he had developed a recognizable brand and had more Twitter followers than the country's President did.

When journalists dug into Bukele's accomplishments in office-the market downtown, the revitalization of San Salvador's historic commercial district-they found evidence of irregularities. The mayor's office had disregarded permits and zoning ordinances. It paid inflated prices to contractors, and kept information from the city council. One businessman who worked with Bukele at the time told me, "Before Bukele, you'd want to get something done, and when you'd go in to meet with the mayor you'd find a long table full of council members, lots of bureaucracy. With Bukele, you'd sit down at the same long table, but it would just be him with an assistant. On the one hand, it was great because it was just one guy. On the other, you'd leave thinking, Uh-oh, it's just one guy."

Bukele came to regard any investigation into his leadership as a personal attack. Edwin Segura, a pollster and a political columnist, told me, "Anytime the media put out something questioning his accomplishments, it was because they were against him." Bukele started building an alternative media landscape: TV programs, a network of trolls on Twitter, an army of YouTubers, and several publications that posted pro-Bukele stories on Facebook.

Bukele's portrayal of himself as a contrarian truth-teller was effective, but it was a falling out with the F.M.L.N. that turned him into a political juggernaut. In the fall of 2017, an argument broke out in a San Salvador city-council meeting over the issuance of a building permit for a revitalization project. According to reporting by Labrador, Bukele accused the council's legal director, a lawyer with the F.M.L.N., of conspiring against him. At one point, she claimed, he threw an apple at her and said, "Take this apple, you witch!"

The incident led to a formal vote expelling Bukele from the Party, but the F.M.L.N. was divided. "The leaders were also scared that Bukele might resign," the official told me. "He was so popular. He had this huge reach on social media. The breaking point was when he wanted to be President. They used the apple to cover it up."

Shortly afterward, Bukele, at a gathering in the U.S. with Salvadoran immigrants, said, " ARENA and the F.M.L.N. are really the same." He announced the formation of a new party, Nuevas Ideas. In February, 2019, he was elected President with fifty-three per cent of the vote.

The arm-bare and handcuffed at the wrist, the hand in a fist-came into view on a two-lane road leading from the capital to San Vicente. It was jutting out from the back of a police pickup truck that was driving past a store called Tulita's Classic Sweets. A man was lying in the bed of the truck, but all that was visible was his arm, chained to a rack attached to the cab.

One of the strangest aspects of the state of exception was how infrequent sightings like this were, unless you went looking for them. The government was broadcasting its harshest acts, and on Twitter there was a flood of photographs, videos, and menacing announcements. But on the main streets of the country's biggest cities nothing seemed out of the ordinary. "The state of exception is directed at the poor, marginalized areas," Rina Montti, the director of investigations at Cristosal, a human-rights group, told me. "These are stigmatized communities with people who are seen as having dudosa confiabilidad "-"questionable trustworthiness." She continued, "You hear people say, 'Surely they must have done something if they're being taken away.' "

On a Saturday night, an old Salvadoran friend of mine proposed that we shoot pool at a billiard hall in San Salvador's historic downtown. He is a father of three in his mid-forties who runs a small business in the capital. The last time I'd seen him-about six years earlier, at the start of Bukele's mayoral term-he made trips downtown only during daylight hours, because it was too dangerous after dark. He was encouraged by the President's actions during the state of exception, as is more than ninety per cent of the population, according to recent polls. "Nayib is fighting," he said. "Of course he has his critics. He's doing new things, radical things. It's all on the up and up. People are always trying to be so down on El Salvador. But I don't hear Salvadorans talking about leaving, like before." At the pool hall, it was Eighties Night, and a d.j. played the Sugar Hill Gang and Run-DMC while people danced and ate tapas. We left after midnight. As we strolled through the illuminated downtown plazas, he snapped photos of the Art Nouveau National Theatre.

In the zonas marginalizadas, where the gangs had been in control, however, residents were effectively trapped between them and the government. I arrived in Distrito Italia, a community of ten thousand people about an hour north of San Salvador, on a Monday evening, to find a cordon of some twenty soldiers in combat fatigues and armed with semi-automatic rifles. They had set up a checkpoint for anyone entering or leaving the residential area. Soldiers searched bags and checked I.D. cards, and as people returned from work the line grew long. The commanding officer sought me out as soon as I arrived. "If you haven't done anything wrong, you'll be fine," he said. "People outside El Salvador probably don't understand."

A few minutes later, I noticed a woman in a green striped shirt, with dark, frizzy hair, standing at a slight remove from the crowd. Her two sons-ages eighteen and twenty-one-were returning from work, and she was waiting to meet them, so that they could all walk home together. Mostly, she felt alivio -"relief"-she said: "There are soldiers inside patrolling." When I asked her whether she worried that her sons might get arrested, she shrugged. "Until it happens to you, it doesn't matter what happens to someone else," Verónica Reyna, a security expert who works at a nonprofit called Servicio Social Pasionista, told me. "It's a survival instinct. The more violence people live with, the less they can care about other people. Getting involved in other people's lives is deadly."

Gangs have dominated life in El Salvador since the late nineties, but they didn't originate there. MS-13 and Barrio 18 both began in Los Angeles, at least a decade earlier, as hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled the civil war. Many of the teen-agers, adrift when they arrived, turned to crime in the inner city, where Mexican and Black gangs enforced a brutal racial hierarchy. After thousands of Salvadoran youths were arrested, the Clinton Administration saw an opportunity to demonstrate its toughness both on immigration and on crime. It deported violent offenders without telling the Salvadoran government who they were. "The United States lets these dangerous types out and tells them, 'Go back to where you came from,' " the President of El Salvador said in 1997. "But we have no way to try them or jail them . . . and so we must not only let them in but let them go free."

Cliques from Southern California arrived in El Salvador, bringing their rivalries and their turf wars with them. "They consumed everything in their path," the anthropologist Juan José Martínez d'Aubuisson has written. "Piecemeal neighborhood gangs saw no choice but to join one of the two for their own survival. The alternative was complete annihilation." By 2015, there were some sixty thousand gang members in El Salvador, and seventy per cent of the country's businesses were being extorted, leading to annual losses of four billion dollars, according to estimates by the Salvadoran Central Reserve Bank. The homicide rate was higher than it had been during much of the civil war.

A series of Salvadoran administrations launched dramatic crackdowns that played well with the public but failed to curb the violence. In 2012, David Munguía Payés, who had served as a general during the war and was now the Minister of Security in an F.M.L.N. government, decided that the gangs, like the guerrillas, couldn't be beaten with force alone. He brought in a former guerrilla, a Catholic bishop, and a representative from the Organization of American States to negotiate with them. A deal was reached, and the homicide rate dropped for almost eighteen months, but revelations of the talks incited public outrage. The next President, who also came from the F.M.L.N., renounced the deal, and the government negotiators were eventually prosecuted for their involvement. In 2020, Munguía Payés was arrested for "unlawful association." Other members of the F.M.L.N. and ARENA have faced jail time for making ad-hoc deals with the gangs, either to enforce higher turnout at election time or to periodically blunt the death count.

As the mayor of San Salvador, Bukele made an agreement with members of Barrio 18, who controlled the area around the Mercado Cuscatlán, according to El Faro. The government gave them space among the venders' stalls, and, in return, the gang allowed the market to operate. Bukele has denied this, and as President he adopted visible measures to combat the gangs. He called his policy the Territorial Control Plan; it increased the police presence in some municipalities and declared a state of emergency inside the national prisons, which had the immediate effect of mixing rival populations that had long been kept apart. At the start of the pandemic, the authorities arranged hundreds of bare-chested prisoners in their underwear, pressed tightly together in rows, for a photo opportunity. One of the President's advisers told me, "Look how he's treating the gangs. How could he be talking to them?"

But Bukele started negotiating with MS-13 as soon as he became President, according to another story in El Faro. During his first year in office, he didn't have a majority in the Assembly, and for his fledgling party to win seats he needed the homicide rate to fall. "The big drops in homicides were never just the work of the government," Verónica Reyna told me. "Bukele learned the lesson from what happened before. He closed ranks. No one had access to the prisons for a year and a half."

The El Faro story relied on hundreds of pages of prison documents, in addition to logbooks from facilities where secret meetings were held between gang leadership and government representatives. In an intercepted message, one leader of MS-13 told another, "Things are going step by step." The government, he said, was increasing enforcement to keep up appearances, so that the negotiations could continue. "These measures are just a coverup," he went on. "They're looking out for the well-being of us homies."

Less than a week after the story was published, Bukele announced that the government would investigate El Faro for money laundering. Since then, he has attacked the newspaper relentlessly, sometimes calling out journalists by name. A few of them have been forced into exile; many others have adopted the practice of leaving the country after publishing a story and waiting to return until the threats have died down. The newspaper has a large international following, but inside El Salvador Bukele's campaign against it has succeeded. Many people have come to see El Faro as partisan and unreliable.

The night before I arrived in El Salvador, the National Assembly passed a sweeping law to block news outlets from reporting on the gang situation. Journalists could now face up to ten years in prison if they "reproduced" or "transmitted" information that might have come from gang sources or could otherwise "panic" the public. The law was ambiguous by design, César Fagoaga, then the president of the Association of Journalists of El Salvador, told me. "This isn't a legal problem-it's a political problem," he said. "They want to control the only thing they don't have-journalism." Claudia Ortiz, a first-term congresswoman from a fledgling party called Vamos, told me, "The real opposition right now that's doing substantive things is outside the Assembly. It's investigative journalism, the universities, social organizations exposing real problems."

In the nine days that I spent in El Salvador in April, three more journalists had to leave the country after being falsely accused by the President and members of his party of conspiring with the gangs. One of them-a reporter named Bryan Avelar, who works with the New York Times-was the target of a viral campaign that claimed his brother was a prominent gangster. (He doesn't have any brothers.) "They know that they can have us arrested if they feel like it," Julia Gavarrete, a reporter with El Faro, told me. Last year, she was one of thirty-five journalists and human-rights advocates to discover that their cell phones had been infected with the surveillance software Pegasus.

The government could deny press reports, but certain facts remained. Last year, Bukele refused a U.S. request to extradite fourteen top-ranking members of MS-13. The Salvadoran government secretly released some of the men from prison, and they are now at large. According to a joint investigation by La Prensa Gráfica and InSight Crime, one of the gangsters, whose nom de guerre is Crook of Hollywood, walked out of the country's most secure prison during a crime wave last November. The following month, homicides decreased.

Recently, the journalist Carlos Martínez published a story in El Faro based on seven audio recordings of conversations between members of MS-13 and a government negotiator close to Bukele. The code name they use for the President is Batman. There are explicit references to two years of secret talks, and the official takes pains to describe everything he's done for the gang to prove his "loyalty and trustworthiness." What caused the killing spree in March, according to three gang members cited in the story, was the arrest of a group of gangsters who were travelling in a government vehicle. They felt betrayed because they'd been promised "safe passage."

Uncharacteristically, the government did not attack the article when it came out. In June, 2022, Patrick Ventrell, the American Chargé d'Affaires, gave a press conference in San Salvador at which he said, "The best way for the government of El Salvador to show that it is serious" about fighting the gangs "is to extradite the most dangerous leaders." Later in the summer, Bukele extradited two of them with little fanfare. This news was eclipsed by the construction of a prison to hold more suspected gang members, which he was calling the Terrorism Confinement Center.

It's taken as an article of faith that the public cares about such abstract principles as the rule of law and the health of public institutions. But voters also want to see their man win, because it means that they're winning. Often, authoritarian tactics play better than high-minded poise does. On February 9, 2020, eight months into Bukele's term, a crowd of a few thousand demonstrators gathered outside the National Assembly, which was not in session. They'd arrived in government vehicles and in buses driven by soldiers, and were there to protest the refusal by members of the Assembly to fund a key plank of Bukele's security budget. Shortly after 4 p. m., a caravan of S.U.V.s pulled up, and Bukele emerged. Surrounded by bodyguards, he strode to a stage set up at the end of an alley leading to the chamber, and the crowd roared. "Wait here," he told them, then headed inside. Armed soldiers in combat fatigues followed him.

While the troops fanned out across the gallery, Bukele called a symbolic session to order. "I think it's clear who's in control of the situation," he said into a microphone. He put it down and bowed his head in prayer. After a few seconds, he rose and returned to the crowd outside. This time, when he approached the stage, half a dozen soldiers stood beside him, their rifles drawn.

"I asked God, and he told me, 'Patience,' " Bukele said. He's never made clear which religion he practices, yet he frequently invokes God, projecting a firm but flexible piety. ("It's one of his key characteristics," Marroquín, of the Central American University, told me. "He can seem Catholic or Protestant, Christian, or even Muslim.") Bukele's religious rhetoric generally sways the public, but this crowd was expecting something more dramatic. People started to groan. "Patience, patience," he repeated. "These sinvergüenzas," he continued, gesturing behind him in reference to the obstructionist congressmen. "We'll get rid of them democratically. . . . In several months, we're going to have the Assembly."

In Central America, the symbolism was lost on nobody: a head of state had just breached another branch of the government with troops. "The whole thing got out of hand," a former government official told me. But those people who thought Bukele would suffer consequences were mistaken. "The most significant thing wasn't what happened but what didn't," Johnny Wright, a congressman with the party Nuestro Tiempo, told me. "That was the moment when he knew, he tested that he would not have resistance."

Hours after the incursion, Bukele received a text message from his former attorney Bertha Deleón. "You've gone too far," she wrote. When he didn't reply, she decided to tweet. His response was swift. "Delete this," he told her. "You're attacking us." Deleón refused, and the government launched a smear campaign against her. She was a trending topic on Twitter for days, accused of protecting the gangs and of abetting criminals. People shouted at her on the street. "I worked for the prosecutor's office for years on organized crime," she said. "Old colleagues came up to me saying, 'Now we're supposed to be investigating you. Fix this, or leave.' " Months later, with multiple corruption charges lodged against her and an Interpol warrant out for her arrest, she told me the story from Mexico, where she had recently been granted asylum.

Bukele's most conspicuous enabler during this period was the Trump Administration. The American Ambassador to El Salvador was a former mid-level C.I.A. staffer named Ronald Johnson, whose relationship with Bukele was characterized by friendly informality. All Trump cared about, a former Administration official told me, was immigration, and Bukele acted accordingly. In 2019, he was so eager to comply with a deal on asylum processing that his advisers e-mailed a signed copy of the agreement straight to the Department of Homeland Security. U.S. officials had to call them back to explain that the protocol was more involved. In return, Bukele "really wanted the State Department to lower the threat level for travel to El Salvador," the former Administration official told me. "That was a really big thing to him. He was promoting Surf City." (Eventually, the U.S. reduced the threat level, which officials claimed to have been reviewing before Bukele pushed for the change in status.)

A few weeks after Bukele's stunt at the National Assembly, the first case of Covid-19 was detected in El Salvador. On March 21st, Bukele declared a state of exception, issuing strict guidelines for a national quarantine. Those people who violated its terms were arrested and sent to "containment centers." In theory, the centers were reserved for Salvadorans who'd been travelling abroad and needed to be tested. But they soon became de-facto jails, where returning travellers and anyone accused of ignoring the rules were held indefinitely, in many cases for longer than a month. Ten thousand people were detained in the early months of the pandemic.

The Supreme Court twice declared Bukele's measures unconstitutional, but he ignored the rulings and accused the judges of threatening public health. "If I really were a dictator, I would shoot all of them," Bukele said. "You save thousands of lives in exchange for five." He publicly commanded the police and the military to make more arrests, in contravention of the judges' orders. "The inflection point was the pandemic," the former government official told me. "That's when Bukele really started taking advantage."

The public was too overwhelmed with its own survival to worry about the finer points of governance, and El Salvador's infection rate stayed low compared with those of neighboring countries. In June, a gleaming new hospital for Covid patients went up, billed as the biggest such facility in Latin America. (It remains unfinished.) The military distributed food to poor areas, and Bukele gave three hundred dollars in cash relief to more than a third of the country. "The people are seeing that he is working hard and doing things for the public," a thirty-three-year-old named Gisele de Hernández, who worked in a tortilla shop, told the Spanish newspaper El País. Another person said, "Bukele isn't dividing El Salvador. The country is already divided."

The following February, when El Salvador held legislative elections, Nuevas Ideas won fifty-six of the eighty-four seats-a super-majority. The new members of the Assembly were a mixture of true believers and opportunists, but all were united in their loyalty to the person who had brought them to power. "Bukele is the Party," a senior U.S. official told me.

The new legislators went after their first target on the day of their swearing in. They arrived at nine in the morning, and the session ran past midnight. "We entered without knowing anything," Claudia Ortiz, of Vamos, told me. The Supreme Court magistrates who had opposed Bukele's pandemic measures were summarily fired, for acting against the best interests of the public. The Nuevas Ideas bloc also fired the Attorney General, whose term was up at the end of the year. The President's personal lawyer told an opposition lawmaker in private, "We have to be disruptive. People voted for us for a reason. They wanted us to change things radically. We're going to change this place for good." Four days later, the Assembly approved a law blocking all investigations into the government's pandemic spending and shielding officials from corruption charges.

Bukele had assumed office saying that his relationship with the U.S. was "the No. 1 priority for us." But the U.S. had a new President, and both countries had changed. "When we tried to normalize the relationship, he felt like we were pulling the rug out from under him," the senior U.S. official told me. "We didn't have the red carpets out, so he thought it was a deliberate attempt to embarrass him." The Biden Administration began drawing up a list of sanctions against members of Bukele's administration, for actions including corruption and conspiracy with the gangs. Bukele continued to meet Johnson, the previous Ambassador, in Miami, and he retained another American adviser, who shared the view that the Democrats wouldn't control the White House for long. When Bukele decided to give a big interview in the winter of 2021, it wasn't to the Salvadoran news media or to CNN but to Tucker Carlson. "He's trying to ride the culture war," the senior U.S. official told me. "But El Salvador does not have the luxury of deciding that one party is going to protect its interests forevermore."

For the past three years, crypto evangelists from all over the world have made a pilgrimage to a rustic beach in El Salvador called El Zonte, where a middle-aged surfer from California named Mike Peterson launched an experimental charity. Its financing came from an anonymous philanthropist who imposed a single condition: the money had to be distributed entirely in bitcoin. Soon, mom-and-pop businesses, markets, and food stalls in the area were accepting the currency. El Zonte came to be known as Bitcoin Beach.

In the spring of 2021, Bitcoin Beach drew a minor crypto celebrity-Jack Mallers, a twenty-seven-year-old tech entrepreneur who was building an app called Strike. The service allows users to make money transfers, with no fees, on Lightning, a high-speed network that is linked to the technology behind Bitcoin. El Salvador fascinated Mallers for reasons that went beyond Bitcoin Beach. Twenty per cent of the country's gross domestic product comes from remittances sent by Salvadorans living abroad, mostly in the U.S. But when immigrants use Western Union to transfer money they typically pay a hefty fee. "Lightning solves that," Mallers has said. "It costs nothing to send one dollar or one thousand." After living in Bitcoin Beach for a month, he started spending time in San Salvador. He was having a sushi dinner with friends one night when he noticed a direct message on Twitter. "Hi, Jack, this is a message on behalf of President Bukele," it began. A few days later, Karim Bukele, wearing a hoodie, greeted Mallers and introduced him to his brother.

At the Bitcoin Conference in Miami that summer, Mallers presented Bukele, who addressed attendees by video, in fluent English. He announced that El Salvador would begin accepting bitcoin, and presented a heady case for how Bitcoin could solve some of El Salvador's problems. Seventy per cent of Salvadorans don't have bank accounts, but more than half of them use cell phones. "El Salvador has not been the country that's recognized to be the first in innovation," Bukele later told the podcaster Peter McCormack. "But why not this time?" Championing the currency has turned him into a global cult hero, a crusader against U.S. hegemony. "This is just exercising our sovereign right to adopt legal tenders, like we adopted the U.S. dollar in the year 2001," he continued. "In 2001, it was probably done for the benefits of the banks, and this decision is done for the benefits of the people."

Salvadorans found out about the Bitcoin policy from news reports after the Miami announcement. The following September, the Bukele administration presented its Bitcoin Law, which Mallers helped shape, and the National Assembly passed it without debate or modification.

Bitcoiners are skeptical of governments and central banks, but their goal is the universal adoption of the currency, and they need more countries to follow El Salvador's lead. Even so, some of them were troubled by its example. The rush to create the Bitcoin Law resulted in confusing provisions: one article mandates that all merchants accept bitcoin, but another seems to hedge on that requirement. "The government operated on a startup's timeline-move fast and break things," Jill Gunter, the chief strategy officer at Espresso Systems, a blockchain company, told me. "But you're talking about an actual sovereign nation, with the well-being of millions of people at stake."

There were some red flags. Bitcoin users need both a public key and a private one to access their money, and many people rely on a "digital wallet" to store these keys. The government created its own-the Chivo Wallet app-but shared virtually no information about who was designing it or how it would work.

One afternoon, I was walking through the main plaza in Usulután, a small city in the country's southeast, when I saw two soldiers standing guard outside a gleaming blue Chivo A.T.M. The unused machine looked like a monument, or a shrine. The businesses that accept bitcoin tend to be large international corporations (Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Starbucks); a recent survey by the Chamber of Commerce found that eighty-six per cent of the country's commercial businesses have never conducted a bitcoin transaction.

Last November, during Bitcoin Week in El Salvador, Bukele made another announcement, this one from a beachfront stage rigged with strobe lights and jets of smoke. The sky lit up with fireworks, and on a giant screen behind him, in neon-blue letters, were the words "El Presidente." The aesthetic was somewhere between a Kiss concert and an I.P.O. "When Alexander the Great was conquering the world, he established 'Alexandrias,' " Bukele said. "These Alexandrias would be like beacons of hope for the rest of the world. We should build the first Alexandria here, in El Salvador. So we were thinking of building"-a pause for effect-"Bitcoin City."

Bitcoin City would be an actual municipality, powered by the geothermal energy of a nearby volcano and funded by a new financial instrument called Bitcoin Bonds, or Volcano Bonds, which will pay yields tied to the sale of bitcoin. The issuance of these bonds, according to Bukele, would raise a billion dollars. The rush of investment would help fund schools, hospitals, and public works-in theory, at least. The question was who would invest in the bonds, given that, by most accounts, their returns were no better than those of the alternatives. Matt Levine, a columnist at Bloomberg, wrote, "People who like crypto will buy them and trade them with each other and feel a sense of kinship and community and fun. They are HODLers and whales, they get to hang out with the president of a country on a Saturday night."

In attendance at the announcement was an American investor and early Bitcoin adopter named Max Keiser, who runs a fund called El Zonte Capital. He's part of a group of international financiers who are selling the image of a dynamic new El Salvador. When we spoke, Keiser had just dined with Bukele at the Presidential Palace. He had flown in with his wife for the occasion, on a plane belonging to "Uncle Ricky," the Mexican businessman and TV magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego, who is a passionate Bitcoiner and a pro-Bukele partisan. Keiser tends to see conspiracies in high places. He suggested to me that the U.S. State Department had been involved in the gang killings in March, but he praised Bukele's state of exception as "phenomenal." "Some suggest human rights have been violated. I would say that the human rights of seven million Salvadorans are what matters," he said. "Imagine J.F.K. if he had Bitcoin to do battle with the C.I.A. and central banks-and what you get is President Bukele today. El Salvador is the new Camelot."

Since El Salvador adopted bitcoin, the currency's value has fluctuated wildly. But Bukele continued to buy more of it with state funds, including a hundred coins last November and five hundred more in early May, after the price dropped. "El Salvador just bought the dip!" he wrote on Twitter. The country now holds some twenty-four hundred bitcoins, worth approximately forty-eight million dollars, or roughly half what Bukele paid for them.

Short-term losses are hardly the biggest danger to the Salvadoran economy. The International Monetary Fund, from which El Salvador sought a $1.3-billion loan, considers bitcoin a threat both to the global financial system and to the country's immediate solvency. In January, 2023, El Salvador will need to make one eight-hundred-million-dollar bond payment, followed by another, in 2025. "The financial markets now see El Salvador as much riskier than before," the economist Ricardo Castaneda told me. "The reasons are failures of democratic institutions, the adoption of bitcoin, and the lack of certainty about plans for paying off the country's debt." The former government official told me, "Bitcoin investment is a cloud that doesn't exist. The state reserves are the last resource for the government to pay for basic needs. Maybe it can get them to the 2024 elections."

Nuevas Ideas shows no signs of losing its super-majority in Congress, yet its members live in fear of misspeaking. Late last year, two of the Party's congressmen were recorded sharing concerns over the phone about losing their travel visas as a result of U.S. sanctions. Both have been forced from their jobs and are currently under investigation.

The only member of the Bukele government willing to speak with me was the Vice-President, Félix Ulloa, Jr. He received me one morning at his official residence, in an upscale neighborhood of San Salvador. He sat in a high-backed wood chair with blue velvet trim. On the wall was a surrealist painting of Lady Justice, blindfolded, with her body floating in three unconnected pieces among the clouds. Ulloa, a short man with long hair and a copper-colored beard, is a constitutional scholar with degrees from universities in three countries. He is thirty years older than the President he serves, and a veteran of left-wing causes.

"I have been a social warrior all my life, and I fought not just with words-we took up arms," he told me. This was a reference to the war years, when he was a student radical. "We fought against a dictatorship. . . . Those who say this is a dictatorship don't know what a dictatorship is." He continued, "We spent the two years of the pandemic clashing with Congress." It was "an assembly dominated by the two parties which blocked everything the President proposed."

We spoke for an hour, during which he delivered a litany of economic-growth figures, improved homicide statistics, and news of prominent foreign investors who had visited the country. Tourism was up, and preparations were under way for an international surfing competition. But all topics led back to a fact that no one could refute: the President and his party had won their elections and continued to enjoy overwhelming public support. Until Bukele lost a vote or rigged an election, the rest was academic. At the end of the month, the state of exception was due to expire. Would the Assembly extend it? I asked. "During the war, we lived six years with a state of exception," he replied. There was "nothing strange" about doing it again.

On a recent night, I was speaking with a woman named Karen, whose husband had been arrested during a work break at a taxi stand in a town near San Salvador. He and his employee were eating pupusas on the street, and, when a cook from the food stall walked over to collect their money, a group of officers converged on the three of them. The charge was "illegal gathering." A jealous neighbor may have called in a tip-Karen's husband had never been arrested, and he was a fixture at their local church. He had also enthusiastically voted for Bukele in 2019. Baffled, Karen tried everything, including speaking to local reporters to publicize the case, but nothing changed. When she first told me the story, we were hunched over a small table in the food court of a mall, her face teary.

We stayed in touch as the state of exception kept getting extended. It is still in effect, even though daily homicides have dropped. Each month, when the Assembly has to renew it, the Speaker convenes the body with an announcement on Twitter. Nuevas Ideas members reply enthusiastically, with emojis and updated profile pictures. Most of them retweet Bukele, who routinely announces days with zero homicides. " Seguimos," he says, at the end of each one-"Onward." Fifty thousand people have now been detained.

"There's no official policy beyond giving people blanket sentences and keeping them detained," Rina Montti, of Cristosal, told me. "We've been to hearings where there are between three hundred and five hundred people being tried en masse. But there's no actual criminal investigation." Cristosal has been documenting detention conditions based on individual complaints brought by family members of detainees. At least seventy people have died while in custody.

Karen has two small children, and she was now caring for them while working two jobs-her own and her husband's. In the first weeks after his arrest, she found time every morning to visit Izalco, the prison where he was being held. It was a two-hour trip, and she made it to prove her vigilance, since the prison didn't allow visitors. The crowds of women who'd once gathered outside small police precincts were now reassembling each day in front of Izalco and Mariona, the two prisons, both overcrowded, where nearly everyone had been sent.

The last time Karen and I spoke, she told me that she could no longer make the trips to see her husband. "Too much work," she said. Her voice was dry, almost raspy with exhaustion. "Everyone is getting six months" in prison, she added. He was now more than halfway through, though his crime remained a mystery. ♦

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The Rise of Nayib Bukele, El Salvador's Authoritarian President

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The budding strongman has ridden Bitcoin schemes and a repressive crackdown on gangs to become Latin America's most popular leader. El Penalito, the little jail, is a squat concrete structure on a busy commercial street in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador.

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‘Never given a chance’: freed asylum seekers lament lost decade in immigration detention

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Advocates hope release of Bangladeshi men is a sign Albanese government is winding back arbitrary detention

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The power of water

Water connects every aspect of life. Access to safe water and sanitation can quickly turn problems into potential - empowering people with time for school and work, and contributing to improved health for women, children, and families around the world.

Today, 2.2 billion people - 1 in 4 - lack access to safe water and 3.5 billion people - 2 in 5 - lack access to a safe toilet. These are the people we empower.
Learn more about the global water crisis > Learn more about the global sanitation crisis >

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The Water Crisis: Shortage, Problems & Solutions | Water.org

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Explore the global water crisis, water shortage, and lack of water affecting billions. Learn how Water.org is tackling these water problems to transform lives.

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Some families in urban areas live in ' food deserts', or neighbourhoods where fresh produce and healthy food markets are nowhere to be found. Others live in ' food swamps ', where unhealthy choices like fast food and chain restaurants overwhelm and underprice the number of healthy options.

Time and convenience are also factors. A single parent may struggle to both work and put healthy food on the table. Rural women in particular are often forced to balance unpaid farm work with their role as primary caregivers. As children grow, the main influences on their diet shift gradually from parents and other caregivers in the early years to the staff of day-care centres or other care providers for young children. When children enter school, their peers and friends hold more influence.

"I come here because it is the closest store to my house. They sell kefir, cottage cheese, powdered milk, soda, chips, alcoholic drinks, cookies and cigarettes."
Yerzhan, 10, Kazakhstan

One important aspect of the food environment, and a major influence on a child's diet, is food marketing. Advertisements, food packaging and digital campaigns targeted at children are building demand for junk food, fast food and sugary drinks. This rise in food marketing is directly linked to the increase of childhood obesity.

Children are exposed to a huge volume of marketing for unhealthy foods every day. A recent study conducted across 22 countries found that for every one advertisement for healthy foods, there were four promoting unhealthy foods. This disparity is even greater in high-income countries like the United States and the United Kingdom.

Lower income countries are also seeing a rapid rise in unhealthy food consumption. From 2011 to 2016, fast-food sales grew by 113 per cent in India, 83 per cent in Viet Nam and 64 per cent in Egypt.

In comparison to traditional television and print marketing, digital marketing poses a unique challenge. Globally, one in three internet users is estimated to be a child. With the rise of smartphones, food marketers have a direct channel for advertising that can precisely target children, and is available to them almost all of the time.

Without effective regulation, this constant stream of food marketing - on TV, in print, on digital channels - is impossible for children to escape. Government legislation appears to be the most effective way to reduce unhealthy food sales, and the World Health Organization urges governments to commit to ending childhood obesity by using proven approaches promote better nutrition and to regulate marketing of unhealthy food to children.

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Some families in urban areas live in ' food deserts', or neighbourhoods where fresh produce and healthy food markets are nowhere to be found. Others live in ' food swamps ', where unhealthy choices like fast food and chain restaurants overwhelm and underprice the number of healthy options.

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NEW YORK, 15 October 2019 - An alarmingly high number of children are suffering the consequences of poor diets and a food system that is failing them, UNICEF warned today in a new report on children, food and nutrition.

The State of the World's Children 2019: Children, food and nutrition finds that at least 1 in 3 children under five - or over 200 million - is either undernourished or overweight. Almost 2 in 3 children between six months and two years of age are not fed food that supports their rapidly growing bodies and brains. This puts them at risk of poor brain development, weak learning, low immunity, increased infections and, in many cases, death.

"Despite all the technological, cultural and social advances of the last few decades, we have lost sight of this most basic fact: If children eat poorly, they live poorly," said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director. "Millions of children subsist on an unhealthy diet because they simply do not have a better choice. The way we understand and respond to malnutrition needs to change: It is not just about getting children enough to eat; it is above all about getting them the right food to eat. That is our common challenge today."

The report provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of 21st century child malnutrition in all its forms. It describes a triple burden of malnutrition: Undernutrition, hidden hunger caused by a lack of essential nutrients, and overweight among children under the age of five, noting that around the world:

* 149 million children are stunted, or too short for their age,
* 50 million children are wasted, or too thin for their height,
* 340 million children - or 1 in 2 - suffer from deficiencies in essential vitamins and nutrients such as vitamin A and iron,
* 40 million children are overweight or obese.

The report warns that poor eating and feeding practices start from the earliest days of a child's life. Though breastfeeding can save lives, for example, only 42 per cent of children under six months of age are exclusively breastfed and an increasing number of children are fed infant formula. Sales of milk-based formula grew by 72 per cent between 2008 and 2013 in upper middle-income countries such as Brazil, China and Turkey, largely due to inappropriate marketing and weak policies and programmes to protect, promote and support breastfeeding.

As children begin transitioning to soft or solid foods around the six-month mark, too many are introduced to the wrong kind of diet, according to the report. Worldwide, close to 45 per cent of children between six months and two years of age are not fed any fruits or vegetables. Nearly 60 per cent do not eat any eggs, dairy, fish or meat.

As children grow older, their exposure to unhealthy food becomes alarming, driven largely by inappropriate marketing and advertising, the abundance of ultra-processed foods in cities but also in remote areas, and increasing access to fast food and highly sweetened beverages.

For example, the report shows that 42 per cent of school-going adolescents in low- and middle-income countries consume carbonated sugary soft drinks at least once a day and 46 per cent eat fast food at least once a week. Those rates go up to 62 per cent and 49 per cent, respectively, for adolescents in high-income countries.

As a result, overweight and obesity levels in childhood and adolescence are increasing worldwide. From 2000 to 2016, the proportion of overweight children between 5 and 19 years of age doubled from 1 in 10 to almost 1 in 5. Ten times more girls and 12 times more boys in this age group suffer from obesity today than in 1975.

The greatest burden of malnutrition in all its forms is shouldered by children and adolescents from the poorest and most marginalized communities, the report notes. Only 1 in 5 children aged six months to two years from the poorest households eats a sufficiently diverse diet for healthy growth. Even in high-income countries such as the UK, the prevalence of overweight is more than twice as high in the poorest areas as in the richest areas.

The report also notes that climate-related disasters cause severe food crises. Drought, for example, is responsible for 80 per cent of damage and losses in agriculture, dramatically altering what food is available to children and families, as well as the quality and price of that food.

To address this growing malnutrition crisis in all its forms, UNICEF is issuing an urgent appeal to governments, the private sector, donors, parents, families and businesses to help children grow healthy by:

1. Empowering families, children and young people to demand nutritious food, including by improving nutrition education and using proven legislation - such as sugar taxes - to reduce demand for unhealthy foods.
2. Driving food suppliers to do the right thing for children, by incentivizing the provision of healthy, convenient and affordable foods.
3. Building healthy food environments for children and adolescents by using proven approaches, such as accurate and easy-to-understand labelling and stronger controls on the marketing of unhealthy foods.
4. Mobilizing supportive systems - health, water and sanitation, education and social protection - to scale up nutrition results for all children.
5. Collecting, analyzing and using good-quality data and evidence to guide action and track progress.

"We are losing ground in the fight for healthy diets," said Fore. "This is not a battle we can win on our own. We need governments, the private sector and civil society to prioritize child nutrition and work together to address the causes of unhealthy eating in all its forms."

######

For photos, broll, the full report, factsheet, graphs and datasets, click here. After 00.01 GMT 15 October, you can browse the special interactive feature on our website or download the report here. Explore the data here.

About UNICEF
UNICEF works in some of the world's toughest places, to reach the world's most disadvantaged children. Across 190 countries and territories, we work for every child, everywhere, to build a better world for everyone. For more information about UNICEF and its work for children, visit www.unicef.org.

Follow UNICEF on Twitter and Facebook

For more information, please contact:
Sabrina Sidhu, UNICEF New York, +1 917 4761537, ssidhu@unicef.org

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Poor diets damaging children's health worldwide, warns UNICEF

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NEW YORK, 15 October 2019 - An alarmingly high number of children are suffering the consequences of poor diets and a food system that is failing them, UNICEF warned today in a new report on children, food and nutrition.

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The intention here isn’t anything as miraculous as recovering the lives of the enslaved or redeeming the dead, but rather laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible.

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The archive yields no exhaustive account of the girl’s life, but catalogues the statements that licensed her death. All

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The method guiding this writing practice is best described as critical fabulation. “Fabula” denotes the basic elements of story, the building blocks of the narrative. A fabula, according to Mieke Bal, is “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused and experienced by actors. An event is a transition from one state to another. Actors are agents that perform actions. (They are not necessarily human.) To act is to cause or experience and event.”

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The artists in this gallery use artifacts, archives, and testimonies—from badges from an ex-slave association to video footage of trans activist Sylvia Rivera speaking to her foresister Mary Jones, who lived a century before her—in works that respond to the legacy of colonialism and its hold in the present.

The title of this gallery is borrowed from Saidiya Hartman, a cultural historian who has written about the afterlife of slavery. Responding to the limits of official archives, she offers us “critical fabulation”—the use of storytelling and speculative narration as a means of redressing history’s omissions, particularly those in the lives of enslaved people. This gallery brings together recently made art that evokes Hartman’s method with a selection of early 20th-century photographs. Together they strive to tell what Hartman has described as “an impossible story.”

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Approach to your collaborative research project

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Approach to your collaborative research project

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so you can break your proposal up into useful sections and use visual material. Think about what your title is, the problem or area you are addressing, contextual and critical research, the approach to your collaborative research project, processes, and the outcome you are proposing. It could be useful to include some evocative or pertinent quotations and/or statistics. Doing this work now will help inform and strengthen your proposal writing!

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Saidiya Hartman, critical fabulation, in ‘Venus in two acts’

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Saidiya Hartman, critical fabulation, in ‘Venus in two acts’

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Israeli designer Yaara Nusboim has worked with a child
psychologist to develop a line of wooden toys that can help
a child deal with difficult or repressed emotions as part of a
therapeutic process. Each of the six Alma dolls has a different sensory emotion - fear, pain, emptiness, love, anger and security - and is used as part of play therapy.
The therapist can observe the child's choices - which toys
they choose, how they play, the concept of play, and the therapist can learn about the child's mental and emotional state through their choices. Each toy is made of polished maple wood, a warm, soft material that contrasts with the color and texture of the silicone inlays.
Fully put into the mind of a child, the function is similar to a decompression toy, it looks ordinary, but the needs of special groups are just enough to be met.

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Wondrous Googles is an Empathy Experience Device. It is specifically designed to facilitate an understanding of the navigational and spatial perception of people with visual impairment. Many of the environments that we encounter on a daily basis presents accessibility barriers, for physical access and for social inclusion. Examples of this situation are public buildings, entertainment venues, museums and galleries. Funded by QUT Design Lab, this research was conducted in a collaboration involving QUT Art Museum, and the Faculty of Creative Industries through the Vacation Research Experience (VREs) Program. The goal of the research was to develop Wondrous Goggles as a research tool to start exploring how to involve stakeholders in the creation of a culture of inclusion.

Wondrous Goggles is a lightweight head-mounted three-functionality device comprising: (i) audio stream, (ii) simulation of a visual impairment condition, and (ii) voice memo recording. During use Wondrous Goggle allows the wearer to embark on the navigation experience of someone with a visual impairment who has navigated the same space. As the wearer 'walks in the shoes of someone's experience', the voice memo recording allows the person to record ideas, emotions, notes, that can be reviewed at a later time. The iterative process of feeling, sensing and reflecting, engages the wearer to create a new lived experience and this is conducive to the building of empathy. Unlike other technologies that create virtual reality or an augmented reality based on vision alone, Wondrous Goggles create a multisensorial empathic experience through the lived experience of a person with a visual impairment.

Ethics Approval # 1800000859 Creating a culture of inclusion in the work environment
Project milestones: 2018-2019 QUT VREs students

Mr Nicholas Sabulis (Industrial Design)

Mr Corey Tiney (Industrial Design)

Miss Katyusha Methanisa (Architecture)

Mr Salvatore Fazzio (IVD)

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wondrous goggles: designing with technology for empathy building

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WONDROUS GOGGLES: Designing with Technology for Empathy Building - QUT Design Lab

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Wondrous Googles is an Empathy Experience Device. It is specifically designed to facilitate an understanding of the navigational and spatial perception of people with visual impairment. Many of the environments that we encounter on a daily basis presents accessibility barriers, for physical access and for social inclusion.

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Witness – You Are the One I Care About Most

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Selena, a mother from Guatemala, has her image digitally re-created from "Carne y Arena." (Chachi Ramirez/Copyright Legendary)

When it is over, you are cold, and alone, wondering who those people were, why they were treated so brutally, and what can be done to make the world right.

Until it closes, sometime late this summer, the hottest ticket in town is likely to be for "Carne y Arena," a virtual-reality experience created by the Academy Award-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Installed in a converted church on Benning Road NE, near the bustling H Street Corridor, "Carne y Arena" uses architecture and virtual reality to immerse participants in a terrifying and topical vignette of modern life, the experience of fleeing violence, crossing borders and confronting the full fury of state power.

After interviewing refugees from Mexico and Central America, Iñárritu has distilled their experience into a 6 ¹/ ₂₋ minute virtual-reality drama that places the spectator directly in the moment when exhausted and brutalized migrants are captured by American border agents, guns drawn, dogs barking and helicopters thundering overhead. It is a shattering experience.

" Carne y Arena," which roughly translates as "Flesh and Sand," premiered last year at Cannes as the festival's first virtual-reality Official Selection, and has been seen in Mexico City, Milan and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It arrives in Washington as President Trump's border wall and the new, ardent nationalism of his supporters threaten to erase this country's self-image as a haven for the oppressed. But Iñárritu, who includes in his woven stories the perspective of a U.S. Border Patrol agent haunted by his encounters with dehydrated and dying migrants, says his goal is to transcend political debate: "Once we intellectualize it and politics gets into it, everything is reduced and everything goes to vulgarity," he said in an interview.

"I try to keep myself away from judgment and not take sides," said the director, whose credits include " Babel," " Birdman" and " The Revenant."

The installation of "Carne y Arena" was no lightly scrubbed, quick-paint-job pop-up. It required not only converting a small church to incorporate a large, sand-covered space for the virtual-reality component, but also the design and construction of a waiting gallery for those with tickets, as well as museum-quality galleries and other rooms. Only one person can enter at a time, and visitors are allowed in at 15-minute intervals, though some will linger longer in the last gallery, which presents biographies of people seen in the virtual-reality room. Passersby will see the old church lined with the rusting metal barrier elements used in some places along the southern border, and a crisp, sleek wood-covered structure for the adjacent waiting lounge.

The experience begins with a brief introduction to the work before you enter a deliberately cold, sterile, cement-floored room with crude metal benches and two lockers for shoes, socks, bags and backpacks. This room mimics the holding cells for detained migrants, who speak of inhumanely cold temperatures and lack of privacy. The virtual-reality component, experienced in bare feet on sand, includes goggles, headphones and a backpack and allows the visitor to move freely through an illusionistic space that gives an uncanny sense of being alone in one of this country's vast and breathtaking Southwestern deserts.

What will an ICE assault on undocumented Americans look like?

The medium of virtual reality is developing at an extraordinary pace. Iñárritu says, "I don't think the technology is yet there, and there is still a lot to really get better." But it was sufficiently developed that he felt he could use it now, even if that meant mustering all his directorial savvy to "hide all the limitations of the medium." The experience he produced breaks free from traditional Hollywood narrative, dispensing with backstory and character development, to focus on what would be, in a traditional film, the climax of the story.

"I think this medium deserves to find its own language," he says. "It should not carry that narrative tradition." Rather, he believes, it should focus on a more abstract representation of space combined with a kind of proto-narrative. Without revealing what happens within the short drama, one can say this: It leaves you with a profound sense of being in the desert, before and after a trauma, and that sense of isolation and beauty combine with the residue of emotion to catalyze a deep sense of common human frailty and vulnerability.

Iñárritu's work offers one answer to a powerful question raised by another virtual-reality experience at last year's Whitney Biennial. Jordan Wolfson's "Real Violence" focused all the power of the technology on a single, brutal scene of violence, in which a young man is beaten and stomped bloody and senseless, on a beautiful, sunny day in New York. It seemed to ask: Which way will this medium drive us, toward voyeurism or empathy? Iñárritu's "Carne y Arena" answers: If used right, empathy is possible.

But what to do with that empathy? Americans have a tendency to think of immigration as a quintessentially American problem, when it is in fact a global issue, and one of the defining issues of our age. We haven't yet comprehended what Hannah Arendt called "the right to have rights" and that no matter what our Constitution says, the United States has an obligation to defend that fundamental ur-right to have rights for everyone within its borders. Neither the United States nor the European Union quite comprehend the corrosive power of militarizing the border against refugees, and how the dehumanizing effects of encounters such as the one depicted in "Carne y Arena" may destroy the very ideals we believe we're protecting.

At the Guggenheim, a narrative of colonialism and desire

So in Iñárritu's work, the invitation to think beyond borders has both a political and aesthetic dimension. We see a nascent technology of fully immersive illusionism, which shatters the traditional frame of the camera, used to depict an episode of terror that should shatter any illusion we have that walls, guns, dogs or armed men brutalizing defenseless people are going to solve the global problem of migration. This feels like an epochal moment. For 2,500 years, at least, from the shadows of Plato's Cave to the cycloramas of the 19th century to Hollywood and virtual reality, the species has dreamed warily of a form of storytelling that would put us in each other's heads, in each other's spaces, fully open to other realities.

"This technology can be used very badly, scarily badly," Iñárritu says. A spokeswoman for the event declined to comment on the cost of the project, which was produced by the Fondazione Prada, the Emerson Collective and Legendary Entertainment. Until the technology is affordable, the development of this medium will probably fall to corporate actors and those who can attract substantial institutional support, which means it may not be a genuinely democratic art form for years to come. And the potential for political manipulation is indeed terrifying.

But this effort, which may in five years be seen as as primitive as the old flickering fantasies of the Lumière brothers, shows the potential of the medium's capacity for utopian epiphanies.

Carne y Arena opens Monday at 1611 Benning Rd. NE. Advance tickets, which are free, are necessary. For more information, visit carneyarenadc.com.

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Review | It takes only 6 minutes to be immersed in the immigrant experience

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When it is over, you are cold, and alone, wondering who those people were, why they were treated so brutally, and what can be done to make the world right. Until it closes, sometime late this summer, the hottest ticket in town is likely to be for "Carne y Arena," a virtual-reality experience created by the Academy Award-winning director Alejandro G.

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Jane Elliott “Blue Eyes - Brown Eyes” Experiment Anti-Racism

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Event Lab, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychobiology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Institute of Neurosciences, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, UK

Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Barcelona, Spain

Virtual reality can be used to visually substitute a person's body by a life-sized virtual one. Such embodiment results in a perceptual illusion of body ownership over the virtual body (VB). Previous research has shown that the form of the VB can influence implicit attitudes. In particular, embodying White people in a Black virtual body is associated with an immediate decrease in their implicit racial bias against Black people. We tested whether the reduction in implicit bias lasts for at least 1 week and whether it is enhanced by multiple exposures. Two experiments were carried out with a total of 90 female participants where the virtual body was either Black or White. Participants were required to follow a virtual Tai Chi teacher who was either Asian or European Caucasian. Each participant had 1, 2, or 3 exposures separated by days. Implicit racial bias was measured 1 week before their first exposure and 1 week after their last. The results show that implicit bias decreased more for those with the Black virtual body than the White. There was also some evidence of a general decrease in bias independently of body type for which possible explanations are put forward.

Introduction

However, this approach cannot explain how there can be perceptual and implicit attitude changes when participants are embodied in a virtual body in a neutral situation-i.e., where there is no social context or when the effect is physiological or perceptual rather than social. For example, recent research employing multisensory integration techniques derived from the rubber hand illusion ( Botvinick and Cohen, 1998) has shown that even pain and temperature sensitivity thresholds of people can be changed through transformed body ownership ( Llobera et al., 2013; Martini et al., 2013). As another example where there was no social context, Banakou et al. (2013) carried out an experiment where adults were embodied in a virtual body representing a toddler (4 or 5 years old), or an adult body that was shrunk down to the size of the child, so that the eye heights were the same in both cases. Hence the only difference between the two bodies was the body shape-childlike or adult-like. When the virtual body moved synchronously with the real body movements of the participant then there was strong body ownership over the virtual body-irrespective as to whether it was the child or adult one. Moreover, participants with the child body approximately doubly overestimated the sizes of objects in the virtual environment, comparing after with before the stimulation, whereas those with the adult body did not. An Implicit Association Test (IAT) ( Greenwald et al., 1998) was used to test the extent to which participants associated child-like or adult like attributes to themselves. Those in the child body condition associated child-like attributes to themselves far more than those with the adult body (who hardly made such attributes at all). When there was visuomotor asynchrony (the virtual body moved independently of the real one, even though there was still first person perspective view over the body) all of these results were extinguished. This was in a context where the only task of participants was to look at themselves (seeing their virtual body) both directly looking down toward their real body, and in the virtual mirror. Hence in this case, since there was no social context, Self-Perception Theory and stereotyping could not apply.

It is possible that in the case of child embodiment the brain relies on autobiographical memory-since all the adults of course had once been children. In order to test this we turned to another example of embodiment where it would not be possible for autobiographical memory to be a factor. Peck et al. (2013) embodied White participants in a Black body. This was a between groups experiment ( n = 15 per group), where White (female) participants were embodied in a Black body, a White body, a Purple body, or No Body. Participants saw their virtual body either directly by looking down toward themselves and in a virtual mirror. In the case of the "No body" condition participants saw a reflected Black body at the correct place geometrically in the mirror, but it moved asynchronously with their movements. In all other cases there was visuomotor synchrony. The scenario was neutral-participants spent altogether 12 min embodied in this way, in an empty room, and eventually 12 virtual characters walked by them (6 White characters and 6 Black). The characters entered their personal space as they walked by. Unlike the study of Groom et al. (2009) there was no social meaning to this that had anything in itself to do with racial bias. A racial IAT was used as the main response variable. It was administered approximately 3 days before the virtual reality exposure (preIAT) and then immediately after (postIAT). The variable of interest was dIAT = postIAT-preIAT.

The levels of body ownership were equivalent for the three embodied conditions and lower for the No body condition. Those with the Black body showed significantly less implicit racial bias after the experiment compared to before-in fact the mean level of dIAT < 0 only for this group. The inclusion of the purple body as a control showed that this was probably a racial effect rather than only being a difference or strangeness effect.

In this paper we describe an experiment that takes these results further. Here the hypothesis was that embodiment of White people in dark-skinned virtual body would lead to a reduction in negative implicit racial bias toward Black people, as described earlier except that we were specifically interested in whether the illusion would last at least 1 week after the final exposure. We were also interested in whether multiple exposures might further strengthen the reduction in racial bias. We carried out two conceptually distinct experiments that we refer to as Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 in order to address these questions.

Materials and Methods

Experimental Design

This experiment was designed to address the question as to whether there is any sustained reduction in implicit racial bias-in particular that lasts at least 1 week -after embodiment of White participants in a Black body, and also whether the effect is influenced by the number of exposures.

The scenario was one where participants were encouraged to follow the movements of a (virtual) Tai Chi teacher. Each participant was embodied in either a Black or White body (Figures 1A,B). The participants had either 1, 2, or 3 exposures, each separate by 2 days. In Experiment 1 the Tai Chi teacher was of Asian appearance (Figures 1A,B). There was visuomotor synchrony so that through real-time motion capture the virtual body moved in synchrony and correspondence with real body movements. Each exposure consisted of a 5-min orientation period, and then the Embodiment condition for 10 min. The experiment is illustrated in Supplementary Video S1.

Figure 1. The experimental scenario, with variations in the virtual body of the participant and the teacher. (A) The participant is embodied in a White virtual body and the Teacher is Asian. (B) The participant is in a Black virtual body and the Teacher is Asian. (C) The participant is in a White virtual body and the teacher is European (Experiment 2). (D) The physical apparatus worn by participants-the head-mounted display and the motion capture suit.

In all conditions the participants were administered a racial IAT test 1 week before their first (or only) exposure (preIAT). They were administered a second IAT always 1 week after their final exposure (postIAT). Hence for each participant, no matter how many exposures they had, they were administered the IAT only twice-1 week before their first exposure and 1 week after their last exposure. The response variable of interest is dIAT = postIAT-preIAT.

Experiment 1 therefore followed a single factor between groups design and an independent variable. The factor was Embodiment (White, Black) indicating the type of body in which participants were embodied. The independent variable was Exposure (the number of exposures to the scenario, 1, 2, or 3). There were 10 participants per group, thus 60 in all, females recruited from the campus at the University of Barcelona.

Experiment 2 was carried out under the same conditions as the first and with another group of 30 participants. The difference was that the Teacher was of European appearance, and the participants (10 per cell) were always embodied as White. Hence the experimental independent variable was Exposures (1, 2, or 3 as before). The reason for this second experiment is explained in the Results section.

Technical Details

Environment

The experiment was conducted in a Virtual Reality (VR) lab (width: 2.96 m, length: 3.4 m-back wall to curtain-height: 2.87 m). Participants were fitted with a stereo NVIS nVisor SX111 head-mounted display. This has dual SXGA displays with 76°H × 64°V (degrees) field of view (FOV) per eye, totaling a wide field-of-view 111° horizontal with 50° (66%) overlap and 64° vertical, with a resolution of 1280 × 1024 pixels per eye displayed at 60 Hz. Head tracking was performed by a 6-DOF Intersense IS-900 device. Participants were also required to wear an Optitrack full body motion capture suit that uses 37 markers and the Motive software to track their movements (Figure 1D). The infrared technology was implemented with a 12-camera truss setup by OptiTrack. Virtual models created with 3D Studio Max 2010 and Autodesk Character Generator. The virtual environment was implemented on the Unity 3D platform.

Tai Chi Animation

The Tai Chi animation was based on a motion captured Tai Chi animation, which was used as a reference to manually build the animation clips. As Tai Chi movements are challenging for beginners to perform, the continuous form of the original clip was broken down into shorter animation clips. These were triggered by the experimenter throughout the experiment. Nine short clips were used in total. The animation was implemented in Autodesk Motion Builder 2014.

Participants

Sixty (Experiment 1) and 30 (Experiment 2) female participants aged 18-44 years (mean age 21.9, SD = 4.45, SE = 0.47) with normal or corrected vision took part in this study. They had no prior knowledge of the experiment, and little or no prior experience of VR. Participants were recruited through posters, e-mail and word of mouth around the campus of the University of Barcelona. Preliminary checks established whether participants fitted the inclusion criteria (Caucasian only, no psychoactive medication, no mental-health disorders, no epilepsy). Participants were provided with an information sheet regarding issues such as the limits of confidentiality, right to withdraw (either during the experiment or later) etc. Written informed consent was obtained. The experimental groups were comparable across a number of variables. The age distribution of participants is shown per condition in Table 1. Almost all the participants were novices in computer programming. In Experiment 1 43/60 played computer video games to a moderate extent (47/60 less than twice a year) with little variation between the experimental groups. In Experiment 2, 24/30 played less than twice a year. On a scale of 1 (no experience) to 7 (extensive) previous experience of VR, the medians are at most 4 across all experimental groups, with the maximum IQR of 4.

Table 1. Mean ± Standard Deviation of Age by experimental conditions.

Procedures

On a first visit, participants were given the study information sheet to read and after they agreed to participate they were given a consent form to sign. Next they completed a short demographics questionnaire (i.e., age, occupation, VR, and games experience etc.) and then completed a racial bias Implicit Association Test (IAT) ( Greenwald et al., 1998, 2003) on a desktop computer, and the results were recorded (preIAT). After a period of 1 week they returned for their first (or only) exposure in the main experiment.

The position of all participants was controlled through Velcro strips on the floor that were used to mark where they should stand during the experiment. These positions corresponded to the centers of the physical and virtual room. Participants were instructed to turn and move their heads and bodies and walk a maximum two steps away from that area, to prevent them from hitting the walls due to the restricted laboratory space.

During the orientation phase of the experiment, participants entered a virtual room decorated with everyday furniture and a virtual mirror. The body of the participant was substituted by the Black or White virtual body, seen from first-person perspective (1PP) (Figure 1). The participant's head and body movements were mapped in real time to the virtual body. They could see this body both by looking directly toward their real body, and also in the virtual mirror. A series of instructions were then given to the participants from a pre-recorded audio. First, they were instructed to perform a simple set of stretching exercises in order to explore the capabilities and real time motion of the virtual body, including movements of their arms, legs and feet. They were asked to continue performing these exercises by themselves and also look around the virtual room in all directions, where they were asked to state and describe what they saw. After this 5-min orientation period, participants were instructed that the second virtual character they would see in the room in front of them would be a Tai Chi teacher who would perform different movements that they should follow. They were free to choose whether they performed each movement simultaneously with the teacher or after the movement was completed. The Tai Chi training went on for 10 min, the same for all conditions and exposure repetitions. The reason of choosing such a setup was to engage participants for the total time required in the virtual environment, and to constantly reinforce visuomotor synchrony. The whole procedure lasted approximately 35 min. Finally, the HMD was removed, and they completed a questionnaire about their experience, including questions about the level of subjective body ownership (Table 2). Those in the multiple exposure groups returned to the laboratory for their second and third sessions 2 days and 4 days later. One week after completion of the final exposure, all participants returned to the lab in order to perform the IAT again (postIAT). Two experimental operators (females) were present throughout the whole experiment.

Table 2. Post Exposure Questionnaire-set of statements each on a −3 to 3 scale with −3 being strong disagreement and 3 being complete agreement.

Response Variables

Racial Implicit Association Test (IAT)

Implicit racial bias was calculated by administering participants an IAT ( Greenwald et al., 1998), 1 week before their first virtual exposure, and 1 week after their last (or unique) virtual exposure. The IAT was completed on the same desktop computer screen both times.

Post-experience Questionnaire

After each exposure a 5-statement post-questionnaire was administered to assess subjective experience of participants (Table 2). A 7-point scale was used ranging from −3 to +3, with "0" indicating a neutral response on each question (with the scale varying from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree). More specifically, these questions were related to the strength of body ownership (MyBody, Mirror) and agency (Agency)-here we require that the levels of body ownership and agency are the same between the two conditions-while others served as control questions (Features, TwoBodies).

Ethics

The study was approved by Comissió Bioètica of Universitat de Barcelona. Ethical considerations included informed consent, right to withdraw, confidentiality and sources of support, if required. Exclusion criteria were epilepsy, use of medication, recent consumption of alcohol, significant back or neck difficulties, intellectual disability and mental health difficulties (e.g., requiring medication), as well race other than Caucasian. Inclusion criteria were as reported in Section Participants. Participants were paid between €15 and €25 (Euros) for participating, according to the number of exposures to which they were assigned, or a pro-rata rate if they chose to withdraw (5€ at the end of the first session and the rest after the end of the last session). Following completion of the last phase, participants were debriefed with an explanation about the purpose of the study. They were also given the opportunity to leave their name and address if they wanted a short summary of the outcomes of the study. All participants were contacted via email 1 week after completion of the experiment to make sure there were not any undesired "after-effects" from exposure to the VR system.

Results

Experiment 1

First we consider the questionnaire responses on body ownership and agency (Table 2). Figure 2 shows the scores on body ownership. The variable MyBody refers to the degree to which participants felt as if the body they saw when looking toward themselves was their body, TwoBodies refers to the extent to which they felt they had two bodies. Mirror refers to the body they saw in the mirror, and Features refers to the extent to which participants affirmed that the virtual body had physical features in common with themselves. TwoBodies is considered as a control question for MyBody and Mirror. All are on a scale from −3 to 3, where −3 means strongly disagree and +3 strongly agree. It is clear that participants tended to affirm the virtual body as their own, irrespective of skin color and irrespective of the number of exposures. On the other hand, they tended to disagree with the feeling of having two bodies. Comparing TwoBodies with MyBody and Mirror it can be seen that even the interquartile ranges of TwoBodies do not intersect those of MyBody and Mirror. Features is the lowest for the Black Embodiment and somewhat higher for the White Embodiment, in line with the fact that the White virtual body would have more in common with the bodies of the participants than the Black body. To test whether there is a difference in scores on Features between the Black and White body we carried out a mixed effects ordered logistic regression of Features on Embodiment × Exposure. Neither the interaction term ( P > 0.38) nor Exposure as a main effect ( P > 0.79) are significant, whereas eliminating Exposure we find that Embodiment has z = 2.86, P = 0.004. Hence the appearance in Figure 2B that Features in the White Embodiment is greater than in the Black Embodiment is supported.

Figure 2. Box plots of body ownership questions by Embodiment and Exposure (A) for MyBody and TwoBodies (B) for Mirror and Features. The thick black horizontal lines are the medians, the boxes are the interquartile ranges, and the whiskers extend to ±1.5 × IQR, or the range. Individual points are outliers.

Agency, referring to the extent to which participants affirmed that the virtual body's movements were their own (Table 2), had a median of 3 in all conditions with the interquartile range, and in most cases the range, no more than 1. This reflects that the real-time motion capture system worked well, since it was in fact the case that the virtual body was programmed to move in synchrony and correlation with real body movements.

Figure 3 shows the plot of postIAT by preIAT across participants in both experiments. It is clear that there is one outlier (id 38), corresponding to a participant in Experiment 1 (Asian teacher) who had 2 exposures. This data point is excluded from subsequent analysis.

Figure 3. Scatter diagram of postIAT by preIAT for all participants in Experiments 1 and 2.

Recall that the racial bias IAT was measured for each person 1 week prior to their first virtual reality exposure. Lower values of IAT indicate less implicit bias against Black. For Experiment 1 preIAT has mean 0.59 ± 0.037 (SE) ( n = 59). For those in the White embodied group the postIAT mean ± SE is 0.60 ± 0.055 ( n = 30), and for those in the Black embodied group 0.36 ± 0.059 ( n = 29). In line with previous results the Black embodiment appears to have reduced the degree of bias but not changed bias to non-bias.

Figure 4 provides a more complete picture showing the means and standard errors of dIAT by the two factors. Recalling that the postIAT was measured 1 week after the final exposure what is interesting is that the results are quite similar to the single exposure experiment of Peck et al. (2013) where the postIAT was measured immediately after the exposure. In that earlier experiment we also found that the mean IAT increased for the White embodied group and decreased for the Black embodied group. We see the same here for those who had only 1 exposure. The number of exposures may have an influence and at each exposure level the decrease in IAT appears to be greater in the Black embodied group than the White.

Figure 4. Bar chart (means and standard errors) of dIAT by Embodiment (Black, White) and Exposures (1,2,3), Experiment 1.

Using dIAT as the response variable for ANOVA results in residual errors that are not compatible with normality whereas using postIAT as the response variable with preIAT as a covariate resolves this problem-although the results in both cases are very similar. For comparison purposes with the results of Peck et al. (2013) we provide the analysis using dIAT in Supplementary Text (#1). ANCOVA of postIAT on Embodiment × Exposures with preIAT as the covariate reveals no interaction ( P > 0.58). Removing the interaction term we find that Embodiment has F(1, 55) = 9.02, P = 0.004 (Partial η ² = 0.14), Exposures has F(1, 55) = 1.96, P = 0.17 (Partial η ² = 0.03). The Overall R ² = 0.26. If we therefore remove Exposure then Embodiment has F(1, 56) = 7.81, P = 0.004 (η ² = 0.14). The covariate preIAT of course always makes a major contribution in each of the models. For example, in the last model preIAT has F(1, 56) = 7.81, P = 0.007, (Partial η ² = 0.12). Overall R ² = 0.24. The Shapiro-Wilk test for normality of the residuals results in z = 1.34, P = 0.09.

Experiment 2

Therefore, we carried out a second experiment under the same conditions as the first and with a different group of 30 participants, except that the Teacher was of European appearance, and the participants (10 per cell) were always embodied as White. If the contact hypothesis were operating, we would expect a reduction in IAT after exposure.

The body ownership results are similar to those of Experiment 1 (Supplementary Text #2). Figure 5 shows the results for dIAT combining the Embodied White with the Asian Teacher from Experiment 1 and the new results from Experiment 2. We find again that the IAT increases after the first exposure with White Embodiment, repeating the result found by Peck et al. (2013) and in Experiment 1 above. There is a hint that indeed the Asian teacher might reduce the IAT more than the European if there is more than one exposure. However, ANCOVA of postIAT on Teacher × Exposures with preIAT as the covariate shows no interaction effect ( P > 0.68) and no main effect of Teacher ( P > 0.86). Eliminating the interaction term the main effect of Teacher is still not significant ( P > 0.59) but Exposures has P = 0.037. Eliminating Teacher results in Exposures having significance level P = 0.036, F(1, 57) = 4.60, R ² = 0.20. (Shapiro-Wilk test for normality of the residual errors results in z = 0.379, P = 0.35).

Figure 5. Bar chart showing means and SEs of dIAT by Teacher and Exposures.

Since Teacher has no effect we can pool all results of both experiments together and test amongst all n = 89 participants (recall that there is one deleted observation) for the effect of Embodiment and Exposures on postIAT with preIAT as a covariate. This is shown in Figure 6. ANCOVA of postIAT on Embodiment × Exposures with preIAT as covariate shows no interaction effect ( P > 0.43). Eliminating the interaction term we find that Embodiment results in F(1, 85) = 9.34, P = 0.003, Partial η ² = 0.10. For Exposures F(1, 85) = 4.51, P = 0.036, Partial η ² = 0.05. (The Shapiro-Wilk test for normality results in z = 1.68, P = 0.046).

Figure 6. Bar chart showing means and SEs of dIAT for all observations (n = 89) by Embodiment and Exposures.

Summary of Findings

The evidence from Experiment 1 suggests that Embodiment in the Black body results in a reduction of implicit racial bias, even 1 week after the end of the experiment. However, the evidence for the influence of multiple exposures is more ambiguous. Figure 4 indicates that there may be some effect even if not statistically significant. The results from Experiment 2 support the conclusion that the Embodied Black condition does reduce implicit bias irrespective of the number of exposures. However, there is also evidence that bias also decreases with the number of exposures independently of the Embodiment factor (White or Black body). The evidence suggests that the Teacher (Asian, Caucasian) had no influence on bias.

Discussion

Body Ownership

Body ownership through first person perspective (1PP) with respect to the virtual body that visually substitutes the real body is a long-standing result. For example, Petkova and Ehrsson (2008) used video cameras mounted on the head of a manikin looking down toward its body, but fed the video stream via a head-mounted display to participants. Provided they were looking down they would see the manikin body as substituting their own. Combined with synchronous visuotactile stimulation on the manikin and real body, so that participants saw something touching the manikin trunk while feeling this synchronously and correspondingly with touches on their body, there was an illusion of body ownership. When there was visuotactile asynchrony the illusion of ownership was significantly reduced. This was backed up by arousal responses (skin conductance) when the manikin body was attacked, but only in the visuotactile synchronous condition. Slater et al. (2010) used virtual reality to similar effect-when participants in a head-tracked head mounted display delivered VR and looked down toward their real body and in a virtual mirror they would see a life-sized virtual body, including the movements of the virtual head that were synchronous and in correspondence with their real head movements. There was a strong illusion of body ownership in the 1PP condition compared to a third person perspective (3PP) condition. Moreover, a strong heart-rate deceleration corresponded to seeing the virtual body attacked in the 1PP but not in the 3PP condition. Unlike Petkova and Ehrsson (2008) synchronous visuotactile stimulation was not necessary to achieve this effect. These two results are discussed by Maselli and Slater (2013), where it was found that 1PP was dominant, and the discrepancy between the two studies might be accounted for by the plastic look of the manikin in the first study, and the more realistic appearance of the virtual body in the second (i.e., with more human skin tones). Petkova et al. (2011) also support 1PP as a critical contributor to the ownership illusion.

Finally, there is also the evidence suggesting that the appearance of the virtual human body does not play a role in the illusion. For example, in Slater et al. (2010) the participants were all men but virtually embodied as a young girl. In Kilteni et al. (2013) and Peck et al. (2013) all participants were light-skinned but the level of body ownership did not differ between a light-skinned, dark-skinned or even a purple body. In Normand et al. (2011) the participants were thin males, but had subjective ownership over a fat virtual body experienced from 1PP and with visuotactile synchrony. Most recently in Osimo et al. (2015) young male participants experienced a virtual body that was a scanned 3D digital copy of their own real body, and a virtual body that was much older depicting Sigmund Freud, in a within group design. Again there was no difference in the level of body ownership even when one virtual body looked very much like themselves, and the other was much older.

Blanke et al. (2015) argued that body consciousness requires integration of proprioception, top-down body-related visual information in peripersonal space, and embodiment. Our setup well integrates these, and is compatible with the multisensory integration approach discussed by Ehrsson (2012). Since there is visuomotor synchrony, proprioception is intimately connected with body-related visual events occurring in peripersonal space, with embodiment such that all sensory information about the virtual body is centered on the location of the real body. Putting this simply, and as we argued in Banakou and Slater (2014), in our whole lives whenever we look down we see our own body. Whenever (under normal healthy conditions) we move our limbs we feel them move (proprioception) and what we see moving are our own limbs. This history therefore provides overwhelming evidence that what we see in virtual reality under conditions of 1PP + visuomotor synchrony is our own body. The fact that it does not look like our body seems to be discounted in the brain's computation of body ownership, and in any case in terms of perception there is no "alternative hypothesis" since the virtual body is the only visible body in peripersonal space. Clark (2013) in a review of the predictive brain paradigm points out that the brain's perceptual system constructs models based on top-down connections that predict a version of the sensory stimuli it is receiving. Hence the model "this is my body" would certainly account for the multisensory information that the virtual body is both visually where the body should be, and integrates proprioception with intentional movement, and looks like a human body. However, it seems that the brain extends this model to include consequences of this being "my body" even when it does not look like it normally looks.

Reducing Implicit Racial Bias

The study has several findings in relation to implicit racial bias. The first is that the earlier results reported by Peck et al. (2013) have been reproduced taking into account those who had only one exposure. After one exposure for those embodied in the Black virtual body the mean implicit bias against Black decreases compared to those embodied in the White body. Second, the reduction is sustained for at least 1 week. Third, the number of exposures may have an effect independently of type of body, a point we will return to below.

The IAT

One way to think about an IAT is that it samples for any individual their statistical associations between categories. If over a long period a person has been subject to information that X is associated with Y but not Z and they are given X with two cues Y and Z there is a higher probability that they will choose Y at a greater speed than they would choose Z in a forced choice. A racial bias IAT ultimately tests the strength of such associations. We contend that in most Western countries there has been a greater preponderance in the media of negative associations with the concept of "Black" people compared to "White," and the racial IAT reflects this in spite of the explicit attitudes of people, so that there is a dissociation between the implicit and explicit bias ( Greenwald and Krieger, 2006). Indeed in the explicit racial attitudes test in Peck et al. (2013) there was no evidence of racial bias, even though the pre-experiment IAT showed implicit bias. However, when it comes to discriminatory behavior the IAT results have better predictive power for social interaction than explicit measures ( Greenwald et al., 2009)-for example, with respect to eye contact, proxemics, and hiring practice ( Ziegert and Hanges, 2005; Rooth, 2010). Even though the use and interpretation of the IAT may be controversial there is significant evidence of its explanatory and predictive power ( Jost et al., 2009).

Now based on this model of how the IAT may work we consider how it can be possible that relatively short exposures of embodiment in a Black virtual body can impact and reduce implicit bias. One answer may be that body ownership and agency over a virtual body is more than a superficial illusion, that it goes beyond the perceptual to influence cognitive processing. We argued in Banakou et al. (2013) and Llobera et al. (2013) that a fundamental mechanism may be through the postulated "cortical body matrix" ( Moseley et al., 2012), that maintains a multi-sensory representation of the space immediately around the body in a body-centered reference frame. The system is responsible for homeostatic regulation of the body, and for dynamically reconstructing the body representation moment to moment based on current multisensory information. Moreover, we propose that it also maintains an overall consistency between the multifaceted aspects of self (personality, attitudes, behaviors) and the body representation. In other words our suggestion is that when the body changes not only are there updates to the multisensory representation of peripersonal space but also there are corresponding psychological updates. For example, when adults are embodied in a child body not only do they overestimate object sizes but they self-identify more with child-like attributes in an IAT classifying self with adult or child-like attributes ( Banakou et al., 2013). We can view IAT changes as direct evidence of this idea, that changing the body apparently leads to changes in implicit attitudes. This is not a process whereby participants in any way believe that their body has changed, nor might they explicitly say that their attitude is now different, but it is a process that occurs below the threshold of consciousness. We can say that as well as body ownership over a different body leading to changes in implicit attitudes, the documented changes in implicit attitudes are a very strong signal that in fact there has been a change in body ownership.

Now as we argued the IAT is simply a statistical measure of association between categories for any individual, for example, based on a lifetime of statistical associations from the social environment. We can think of this as there being a current joint probability distribution over the sets of categories, and the IAT is based on sampling this distribution. Now thinking of this in Bayesian terms the process of embodiment, where e.g., the White person now has a Black body, provides a strongly weighted piece of new evidence that leads to an update of this probability distribution. The vast amount of statistical evidence that made up the probability distribution is for most people based on impersonal evidence. It is just picked up from everyday commentary, for example, in the media. Now though there is a new piece of "evidence" of critical importance-"I" have a Black skin, and "I" in turn carries with it a whole set of associations with the positively/negatively valenced categories that are likely to be very different from the associations with the out-group. This leads to a new probability distribution-as if the new embodiment information disrupts the previous associations between categories. The one piece of new evidence is a critical one-since it is about the self. Hence it could be argued that the changes in IAT are produced by a disruption of the standard associations between "Black" and "negative"-based on the new observation that "I can be Black." In the terminology of the opening paragraph of this section X (Black) is typically associated with Y (a set of negative attributes) but not Z (a set of positive attributes), so that in rapid sampling of associations with X there is higher probability of choosing elements from Y instead of Z. However, the embodiment of Self as Black can change the associations with X because X has now been identified with Self, which in turn will have its own distribution of probabilities over elements in Y and Z. Hence sampling the associations with X after embodiment is, in this explanation, likely to lead to a different outcome than prior to embodiment. However, this argument relies on the participant being more likely to have positive (Z) than negative (Y) associations with Self. This leads to the testable hypothesis that the reduction in IAT should be more likely to occur for individuals with higher self-esteem than those with lower self-esteem. We do not have such data in this experimental study, but this is left as further work as a way to test this model.

From our current results it seems that just one exposure is already sufficient to disrupt the probability distribution in this model. This argument is similar to that of Maister et al. (2015): that similarity between appearance of the self (as transformed during body ownership) and the out-group results in the disruption of associations between the out-group and negative valence items, and substituted by positive associations with the self.

The IAT and Saliency

Treating IAT as measuring associations though is only one way (even if the dominant one) for understanding how this measure works. Rothermund and Wentura (2004) introduced an alternate figure-ground explanation, where the most salient aspects of the target tend to be associated with the most salient attributes, independently of whether there are psychological associations between the two categories. For example, suppose the target categories are the musical instruments sitars and pianos, and the attributes are words with positive and negative valence. The explanation supposes that sitars are more salient, being the more unusual in most countries, appearing as a figure against the background of the more common pianos. Similarly, unpleasant words stand out more against the background of pleasant or neutral words. Hence subjects find it easier to quickly associate two salient categories together, even though there may be no intrinsic psychological association between sitars and negative words. In a series of experiments Rothermund and Wentura (2004) provided strong evidence that this explanation is viable-although the two different explanations, associative and figure-ground, are not mutually exclusive.

In our experiment it could be argued that the racial categorisation "Black" is more salient than White, and therefore is more likely to be associated with salient negative attributes compared to positive. In this explanation embodiment of a White person as Black changes the ground, so that Black is no longer salient. However, this seems unlikely as an explanation for these particular results. Participants had short embodiment exposures and otherwise during the time of the experimental period of course lived their normal lives in society where "Black" would be more salient than "White." Also we would expect that more exposures as Black might make "Black" less salient, but the number of exposures operated independently of the type of embodiment. However, in the associations based explanation a single embodiment exposure as "Black" in itself provides evidence "I can be Black" and thus disrupt associations between positively/negatively valenced attributes (since these are now confounded with associations that apply to the self).

The Number of Exposures

The results suggest that the number of exposures may be associated with a decrease in implicit bias irrespective of the type of embodiment. The explanation that this may be due to the contact hypothesis was not borne out by Experiment 2. Apart from simply being in VR the only other invariant across the two embodiment groups was that all practiced Tai Chi movements as part of the experiment. Tai Chi has been shown to have positive psychological benefits including a reduction of stress and anxiety, and more generally a number of positive health advantages-see the meta studies by Sandlund and Norlander (2000) and Jahnke et al. (2010). As noted by Sandlund and Norlander (2000) Tai Chi has elements in common with mindfulness meditation. Moreover, as reported by Lueke and Gibson (2014) mindfulness meditation reduces implicit racial and age bias. In that study participants listened to a 10 min mindfulness or a control recording. Those in the mindfulness group showed statistically significant but moderately less implicit bias than the control group. Similarly, and with more striking results Lueke and Gibson (2016) showed that a group that received a brief mindfulness meditation exposure exhibited less behavioral racial bias than control groups. Also in the context of prejudice against persons with disabilities, Schimchowitsch and Rohmer (2016) also showed moderate effects in the reduction of bias in a group that practiced yoga and mediation compared to a control group that did not. In our study the greater the number of exposures that participants had the greater their exposure to Tai Chi, with each Tai Chi session lasting for 10 min. Of course we cannot know whether or how much they entered any kind of meditative state, or whether they thought any more about their experience outside of the experimental sessions. It remains an intriguing possibility though that simply their exposure to Tai Chi may have influenced their level of implicit bias. We leave this as an open question for further research.

Conclusions

Returning to the questions that this paper addressed our overall findings are that: first, body ownership over a differently raced body has again been shown to occur, suggesting that ownership is not contingent on the appearance of the virtual body. Second, there is further evidence that embodiment of White people in a dark-skinned virtual body does diminish their implicit racial bias. Third, this diminution lasts at least 1 week after the end of the exposure. Finally, one exposure is sufficient to observe this effect. Further replication studies would be needed to further support the last point. Moreover, it is important to note that the experiment involved only female participants. While there is some evidence that there is greater implicit racial bias amongst females compared to males (but greater explicit bias of males compared to females) ( Ekehammar et al., 2003), further replication studies should address this issue.

Data Accessibility

The datasets supporting this article have been uploaded as part of the Supplementary Material.

Author Contributions

MS designed the experiment with the help of DB. The computer programming was carried out by DB and PH. The experiment was run by DB, the statistical analysis was carried out by MS, the paper was written by MS and DB, and checked by all authors. PH contributed to this work while a student on the MSc Computer Graphics, Vision & Imaging at UCL, during which time he carried out the project at the Event Lab, University of Barcelona.

Funding

This research was funded under the European Seventh Framework Program, Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) project VERE (#257695). DB was supported by the FI-DGR 2014 Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca, Generalitat de Catalunya, Ajuts per a la contractació de personal investigador novell.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We thank Irene Torres for help in running the experiments.

Supplementary Material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00601/full#supplementary-material

Supplementary Video S1. A video illustrating the various conditions of the experiment.

Footnotes

References

Ehrsson, H. H. (2012). "The concept of body ownership and its relation to multisensory integration," in The New Handbook of Multisensory Processes, ed B. E. Stein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 775-792.

Nosek, B. A., Greenwald, A. G., and Banaji, M. R. (2007). "The implicit association test at age 7: a methodological and conceptual review," in Social Psychology and the Unconscious: The Automaticity of Higher Mental Processes, ed John A. Bargh (New York, NY: Psychology Press), 265-292.

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Virtual Embodiment of White People in a Black Virtual Body Leads to a Sustained Reduction in Their Implicit Racial Bias

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Virtual reality can be used to visually substitute a person's body by a life-sized virtual one. Such embodiment results in a perceptual illusion of body ownership over the virtual body (VB). Previous research has shown that the form of the VB can influence implicit attitudes.

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Information Experience Design
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A Stanford-developed virtual reality experience, called "Becoming Homeless," is helping expand research on how this new immersive technology affects people's level of empathy.

According to new Stanford research, people who saw in virtual reality, also known as VR, what it would be like to lose their jobs and homes developed longer-lasting compassion toward the homeless compared to those who explored other media versions of the VR scenario, like text. These findings are set to publish Oct. 17 in PLOS ONE.

"Experiences are what define us as humans, so it's not surprising that an intense experience in VR is more impactful than imagining something," said Jeremy Bailenson, a professor of communication and a co-author of the paper.

Emerging research, nascent technology

Many enthusiasts of virtual reality view the immersive technology as "the ultimate empathy machine" that can help people relate to each other better than novels, TV shows or films can.

But there is little research examining how exactly this emerging technology can alter people's attitudes.

"About 10 million headsets have been sold in the U.S. over the past two years. So, many people now have access to VR experiences. But we still don't know much about how VR affects people," said Fernanda Herrera, a graduate student in the Department of Communication and the lead author of the research paper. "This research is an important step in figuring out how much of an effect this technology can have on people's level of empathy in the long term."

"Empathy isn't just a trait. It's something you can work on and turn up or down in different situations."

-Jamil Zaki

Assistant Professor of Psychology

Past research on VR and empathy has shown mixed results and used small sample sizes composed mostly of college students, Herrera said. In addition, previous studies have not examined the long-term effect of VR on empathy beyond one week.

As part of the research, Herrera, along with Stanford psychology scholar Jamil Zaki, Bailenson and psychology graduate student Erika Weisz, conducted two 2-month-long studies with more than 560 participants, age 15 to 88 and representing at least eight ethnic backgrounds. Researcher Elise Ogle was also a co-author on the paper.

During the research, some participants were shown "Becoming Homeless," a 7-minute VR experience developed by Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

In "Becoming Homeless," a narrator guides participants through several interactive VR scenarios that would happen if they lost their jobs. In one scene, the participant has to look around an apartment to select items to sell in order to pay the rent. In another scene, the participant finds shelter on a public bus and has to protect belongings from being stolen by a stranger.

Go to the web site to view the video.

The researchers found that participants who underwent "Becoming Homeless" were more likely to have enduring positive attitudes toward the homeless than people who did other tasks, such as reading a narrative or interacting with a two-dimensional version of the scenario on a desktop computer. The same people were also more likely to sign a petition in support of affordable housing, according to the research.

"Taking the perspective of others in VR produces more empathy and prosocial behaviors in people immediately after going through the experience and over time in comparison to just imagining what it would be like to be in someone else's shoes," Herrera said. "And that is an exciting finding."

Measuring empathy over time

Empathy, the ability to share and understand someone else's emotions, is a critical part of meaningful social interactions, according to scholars. It has been shown to increase people's understanding of one another and to motivate positive social behaviors, such as donating, volunteering or cooperating with others.

"We tend to think of empathy as something you either have or don't have," said Zaki, an assistant professor of psychology and a co-author of the paper. "But lots of studies have demonstrated that empathy isn't just a trait. It's something you can work on and turn up or down in different situations."

The studies' results showed that participants in the "Becoming Homeless" condition were significantly more likely to agree with statements like "Our society does not do enough to help homeless people." They were also more likely to say that they personally cared "very much" about the plight of homeless people. The research also showed that their empathetic attitudes toward the homeless endured.

In addition, according to the first study, 82 percent of participants in the VR condition signed a petition supporting affordable housing versus 67 percent of the people who read a narrative that asked them to imagine becoming homeless.

In the second study, 85 percent in the VR condition signed the petition in comparison to 63 percent who read the narrative. Of participants who went through the two-dimensional version of the VR experience, 66 percent signed the petition.

"What's special about this research is that it gives us longitudinal evidence that VR changes attitudes and behaviors of people in a positive way," Bailenson said.

More research ahead

Not all empathy exercises that introduce perspectives of different groups produce positive effects, the researchers said. For example, previous research has shown that when people are asked to take the perspective of their competitors, they become less empathetic toward them.

Similarly, the format of a VR experience also matters when considering how it might alter people's attitudes, Herrera said.

Herrera, Bailenson and other researchers are working on other studies to figure out the nuances of VR's effects on people.

But for now, Herrera and her team are excited about the evidence that they have gathered in their new study.

"Long after our studies were complete, some research participants emailed me to reflect on how they started becoming more involved in the issue afterward. One of them befriended a homeless person in their community and wrote me again once that person found a home," Herrera said. "It was really inspiring to see that positive, lasting impact."
The research was supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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Virtual reality can help make people more empathetic | Stanford News

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A Stanford-developed virtual reality experience, called "Becoming Homeless," is helping expand research on how this new immersive technology affects people's level of empathy. According to new Stanford research, people who saw in virtual reality, also known as VR, what it would be like to lose their jobs and homes developed longer-lasting compassion toward the homeless compared to those who explored other media versions of the VR scenario, like text.

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Disabled people
people of colour
gender
low resources
low financial- poverty
elderly people
children

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Can someone really be compassionate at all times without any selfishness?

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Can someone really be compassionate at all times without any selfishness?

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How to get the marginalised people noticed?

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How to get the marginalised people noticed?

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How to make the action of empathy brings good results?

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How to make the action of empathy brings good results?

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Empathy: the ability to imagine oneself in the other person's situation and to experience their feelings. According to the definition, empathy involves at least two levels: the ability to discern the emotions of others; and the ability to empathize.

Main points：

Discerning Emotions-Thinking differently-Good communication-Non-judgmental-Response-Sincerity

Level 1: Discerning the emotions of others

Discerning the emotions of others refers to being aware of and discerning the likes and dislikes of others. Even for healthy people, it is possible to have difficulty distinguishing emotions in others. For example, children who grow up in serious, stereotypical homes where families rarely communicate their feelings and concerns to each other are more likely to develop emotional and interpersonal difficulties as adults. In other words, the ability to distinguish emotions from others is not an innate skill, it needs to be acquired and practiced over the course of life.

Level 2: Enter the situation of others and feel their emotions

For example, when children encounter problems and discuss with their parents for help, traditional Chinese thinking parents are often accustomed to standing in their own perspective and educating their children according to their own experiences, imposing their subjective consciousness and personal experience on their children, which in turn easily causes them distress.

Many times, complaints and requests for help are more about asking the other person to understand their feelings and emotions at the moment. When the listener does not understand, or even forcefully gives advice, the receiver only feels pain and helpless. This is especially true when the person seeking help plays an important role in the person's life, such as parents or close friends, the desire for understanding is stronger, and the helplessness that comes from not being understood is doubled.