School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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Author: Davis, Mark ×

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 29
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    Unsettled Objects: Books, Cultural Politics, and the Case of Reading the Country
    Davis, M ; MORRISSEY, P ; Healy, C (UTS ePress, 2018)
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    After Christchurch: Alt-right Discourse and Ideology in Australia and the Platformisation of Extremism
    Davis, M (ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-07-04)
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    Feminism in the troll space: Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl, social media, and the networked book
    Weber, M ; Davis, M (Taylor and Francis, 2020-01-01)
    Clementine Ford’s memoir/manifesto hybrid, Fight Like a Girl, was hailed as a significant contribution to feminist debate in Australia when it was published by Allen & Unwin in 2016. The book is one stage in Ford’s considerable media career, developed across traditional journalism, public speaking, and social media. It can be situated in the context of a recent Anglophone publishing trend of similar hybrids between feminist manifesto and memoir, as well as—as evidenced by its cover quote from Anne Summers—being part of a much longer history of Australian feminist publishing. This article positions Fight Like a Girl as a networked text, exploring its close and constitutive relationship to Ford’s social media presence and its online reception. Both book and reception tap into online feminist conversations and mainstream public debates about feminism in the wake of identity politics, trolling and shaming, and the gendered nature of contemporary online spaces. Analysing conversations on Facebook and Twitter and reviews across Goodreads and more traditional media outlets, this article explores the extent to which the book reconfigures, intensifies or enters into existing conversations as it moves through the networked space of post-digital Australian literature.
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    The online anti-public sphere
    Davis, M (SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2021-02-01)
    In this article, I outline the online ‘anti-public sphere’ as an object for analysis, defined as that space of online socio-political interaction where discourse routinely and radically flouts the ethical and rational norms of democratic discourse. This is a formerly offline space made newly visible by digital networked media. It includes discursive spaces and forms such as White supremacist websites, anti-climate science forums, militant ‘men’s rights’ sites, anti-immigration Facebook pages, gay hate memes, misogynist trolling, anti-Semitic websites, alt-right websites and ‘truth’ (conspiracy) websites, to name a few, where discussion flouts norms of public debate, rules of argument and requirements for the rational consideration of evidence for its own ends. Building on earlier work on anti-publics by McKenzie Wark and Bart Cammaerts, and working from examples from several different domains of online anti-public discourse, I argue that despite its size and complexity, it is possible and necessary to theorise this heterogeneous discursive field, not least because while such discourse is often dismissed, the meanings developed in such domains increasingly intermingle with and inform everyday democratic discourse. While we tend to think of extreme and irrational online discourse as aberrant and alien to everyday democratic discourse, analysis suggests that such discourse in fact is a precise reflection of an everyday ‘post-normative’ democratic discourse that has itself become deeply inflected with reactionary and populist themes.
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    Culture wars and corporatism: The cultural mission in Australian non-fiction book publishing, 1958–2018
    Davis, M (Australian Literary Studies, 2020-04-28)
    In this article I investigate four phases in Australian non-fiction publishing between the late 1950s and early 2000s, focused on works of current affairs, politics and popular history. Many such books, I argue, were published as part of a ‘cultural mission’ in Australian non-fiction book publishing, where an imperative for reform motivated many publishers to publish books they believed to be of greater than commercial importance. The paper first defines ‘cultural mission’ publishing. I then argue that such publishing has played a crucial role in Australian culture wars and struggles over national identity since the late 1950s and that these struggles have played out in four overlapping phases that reflect shifts in national debate and the commercial imperatives of book publishing. These consist of, first, a ‘renaissance’ phase from the late 1950s until roughly the late 1960s; second, an ‘insurrectionist’ phase from the late 1960s until the mid-1980s; third, a ‘reaction’ phase from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, and fourth a ‘corporatist’ phase that gathered pace in the late 1990s.
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    Networked hatred: new technology and the rise of the right
    Davis, M (Griffith Review, 2019)
    EVERY ERA IS defined by its sustaining myths. Among ours is surely ‘disruption’. The book that seeded the mythology, Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma (Harvard Business School Press, 1997), is only a little more than twenty years old, yet its ‘technological disruption’ thesis has become an article of faith for business and government, trafficked like... Read more
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    A new, online culture war? The communication world of Breitbart.com
    Davis, M (Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2019-01-01)
    Public debate about the US culture wars reached a rancorous peak in the 1990s. At the same time, a no less contested scholarly debate was taking place over the significance of the culture wars, with many critics of the period dismissing the culture wars as an elite affair–a ‘war of words’–that mattered little to ordinary Americans. Meanwhile, recent accounts of the culture wars have declared them ‘over’. In this paper, I revisit the culture wars through the lens of far right website Breitbart.com, to show how Breitbart deploys a ‘culture wars discourse’ that reinvigorates the key ideas that animated the US culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s. The manifest political influence of sites such as Breitbart, I argue, represents a new development in the process by which cultural politics are increasingly framed by digital networked media.