It may work in Totnes, with the input of small amounts of funding, its wider 'transition town' context and a dedicated team of volunteers, but elsewhere?
"I suppose the reason why I put it in a small town context was because there was those two cases in America in a small town and I could see the correlations between small town life and jock culture, and how those two translated to my own small town.
"In these small-town contexts, that's just how people are," he says.
By introducing pump jacks, a familiar symbol of American oil-producing towns, into a context more typically defined by eye-popping electronic billboards and dazzling lights, "I wanted to show the consequences, or the flip side, of what we actually have to do to provide all of that energy," Ms. Meckseper, 47, said in an interview last week.
Distress (or, for that matter, happiness) at the outcome of an election is not an appropriate driver of classroom discussion, although of course one can imagine other contexts — town hall meetings, noon-time rallies, late-night bull sessions ― in which the expression of political sentiments would be expected and exactly on point.
"I can't separate Moore from the idea of public space and of art seen in the context of town planning,' says Gareth Jones (whose own recent preference is for elegant understated works in materials such as Fablon, newsprint and chipboard).
ALL this is to say the familiar theme of Old World-New World culture clash — "inappropriate" young American set loose in the staid medieval Umbrian hill town — misses the actual context in which the case unfolded and attained its worldwide traction.
Of course, there are many types of urban context – large/small town, capital/secondary city, urban/peri-urban, informal/formal dwelling and recent/long-term residents – and I am grossly simplifying things by conflating them (Satterthwaite has a nice "health warning for generalisers" at the end of this report (pdf)).
The maritime approaches to the town also provide the context for a cultural display of religious allegiance and power through the symbolism of conspicuously sited mosques and a more perplexing series of causeways.
For context, the town has a population of 4,373.
Two corollaries follow : (a) attributable proportions may be fully valid when referred to a local and well specified context (a town, a firm etc).
