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"Night trains have long fascinated us with the possibilities of their private sleeping compartments, gilded dining cars, champagne bars and wealthy travellers. Authors from Agatha Christie to Graham Greene have used night trains to tell tales of romance, intrigue and decadence against a rolling background of dramatic landscapes. The reality could often be as thrilling: early British travellers on the Orient Express were advised to carry a revolver (as well as a teapot). In Night Trains, Andrew Martin attempts to relive the golden age of the great European sleeper trains by using their modern-day equivalents. This is no simple matter. The night trains have fallen on hard times, and the services are disappearing one by one. But if the Orient Express experience can only be recreated by taking three separate sleepers, the intriguing characters and exotic atmospheres have survived. Whether the backdrop is 3am at a Turkish customs post, the sun rising over the Riviera, or the constant twilight of a Norwegian summer night, Martin rediscovers the pleasures of a continent connected by rail. By tracing the history of the sleeper trains, he reveals much of the recent history of Europe itself. The original sleepers helped break down national barriers and unify the continent. Martin uncovers modern instances of European unity - and otherwise - as he traverses the continent during 'interesting times'"--Dust jacket

This paper views tertiary language learners' gaining a sense of cultural belonging and an awareness of intercultural communication through three prisms: (i) the metaphor of "investment", (ii) the notion of "community of practice" and (iii) the concept of "imagined community". Applied to environments of real world learning, specifically the volunteer sector, the notion of "community" holds a key to reshaping the cultural education experiences for participants in language learning programs, including learners of English as an Additional Language (EAL). This paper examines facets of "community" to contextualise the experiences of learners in a project where advanced EAL learners undertook volunteer work as part of a cultural learning curriculum within a Bachelor of Arts in EAL at a tertiary institute in New Zealand. This project gave learners access to "communities of practice" (Lave & Wenger 1992; Wenger 1998), providing contexts where instructors can reshape learners' higher education experiences by identifying cultural learning opportunities within the volunteer sector of the community. In educational research, the properties of community include insider support, common goals, shared discourse and membership (Rovai 2002a). The occurrence of such features in a student's volunteer placement depends on the degree of "investment" (Norton 2000; Pittaway 2004) participants have in individual and community goals. In the project, the journalised reflections of the participating migrants, refugees and international students reveal the cultural and ontological value of community work. This paper uses the concepts of real and imagined communities to theorise the participants' investments in their learning, presents qualitative findings from the project, and describes a range of benefits for EAL learners' learning in community. The paper concludes that investing in community can prepare learners for their future and imagined communities while reshaping significant aspects of cultural learning.

The bureaucratization of many social movements has generated controversy among scholars and activists alike. While there is considerable evidence that formalized social movement organizations (SMOs) tend to be successful, critics maintain that such actors invariably shift resources away from protest, reducing their disruptive potential. The current research seeks to reorient this debate by introducing the concept of threat as an integral, but overlooked, dimension of protest. Specifically, I hypothesize that the costs associated with collective action will motivate formalized SMOs to leverage the threat of protest to achieve new gains. The empirical case is made using data from a sample of labor unions and their strike activity from 1990-2001, a period of growing acrimony between organized labor and firms that is particularly well suited for analyzing threat. The findings highlight the role of threat in movement challenges and how it interacts with the broader environment within which the SMO is embedded.