Belgian surveillance plans to assess changes in Salmonella prevalence in meat at different production stages

From 1997 to 1999, the prevalence of Salmonella was assessed at different stages through the pork, poultry, and beef meat production chains. Different dilutions of the initial sample suspension were analyzed to provide a semiquantitative evaluation of Salmonella contamination and to determine the most representative dilution necessary to detect a reduction in prevalence. An average of 300 samples for each type of meat were analyzed. According to Fisher's exact test, the dilution to be used to detect a reduction in prevalence was chosen based on an initial prevalence of 20 to 26%. Based on this introductory study, a new sampling plan representative of the nationwide Belgian meat production process was used from 2000 through to 2003. This study confirmed the consistently high rate and level of contamination of poultry meat: broiler and layer carcasses were the most contaminated samples followed by broiler fillets and poultry meat preparations. A constant and significant decrease in Salmonella prevalence was observed for pork carcasses, trimmings, and minced meat and for beef minced meat. Less than 3% of beef carcasses and trimming samples were positive for Salmonella. The Belgian plan, as utilized from 2000 to 2003, was suitable for monitoring of zoonoses because the sampling plan was representative of nationwide production processes, covered all periods of the year, and was executed by trained samplers and the analyses were carried out by recognized laboratories using an identical analytical method

Participation and receptivity in the art museum:a phenomenological exposition

There is a powerful trend in museums today of asking visitors to participate in the exhibitions, co‐create content, and to be active and engage with one another in the museum space. While welcoming the participatory agenda as an initiative of democratizing art museums, we argue in this paper that the rise of the participatory agenda also redefines the purpose of the art museum in a way that risks overlooking the kinds of experiences people undergo in art museums. Based on qualitative and phenomenologically inspired interviews with museum visitors, we present a sketch of a class of aesthetic experiences that ought to be taken into consideration in curatorial practices. Developing a picture of the phenomenology of aesthetic experience, we argue that such experiences should be taken into account when considering the question of the purpose of the art museum

Atmospheres of the inhospitable in staged kidnappings

This article explores the paradoxical staging of experiences of “inhospitality,” taking shape as commercialised opportunities for individuals, willing to be voluntarily subjected to kidnapping. Such “extreme” leisure is facilitated by companies specialising in simulated captivities of clients. These simulations, which blend forms of performance with practices of violence, are situated theoretically within a revised iteration of Benjamin Barber’s thesis about “Jihad vs McWorld.” Barber’s original thesis would locate such stagings within a broader tendency of contemporary capitalism to co-opt and commoditise experiences associated with “terror” and suffering. Unlike Barber, we focus on the aesthetics and atmospheres of such experiences. We aim to comprehend the ways artistic “violence experts” articulate the meaning of such leisure for subjects striving to confront and manage the risks and uncertainties of a conflict-ridden lifeworld. Resembling the schadenfreude of dark tourism and the art of performance, kidnapping packages promote a form of aesthetic education into uncertainty

Un/doing gender and the aesthetics of organizational performance

In the age of the so-called 'expressive organization' and the 'aesthetic economy', for an organization to compete in the global marketplace it would appear that it must perform. This does not refer simply to economic performance, but rather to the idea of performance as a means of affecting both people's impressions and definitions of reality. In this article we argue that such performativity is achieved, in part, through the power of symbolism and aesthetics, as well as the capacity to bring oneself into being in an environment in which successful management of the aesthetic has increasingly become a prerequisite for the conferment of recognition. Central to this process are the ways in which the aesthetics of gender are mobilized and indeed simultaneously 'done' and 'undone' in order to affirm particular, but often unstable, regimes of managerially desired meaning. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, and informed by a critical or hermeneutic structuralism, we are concerned here to think through the relationship between performativity and the gendered organization of the desire for recognition as it is materialized in, and mediated by, the landscaping of corporate artefacts and organizationally compelled ways of un/doing gender. With this in mind, we consider a series of images taken from a sample of recruitment documents that, as cultural configurations that organize and compel particular versions of gender, we argue, are concerned with the production of organizationally legible and therefore viable gendered subjects