School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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1 - 10 of 2044
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ItemThe face of the environment: environmental human rights on screen(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-01-02)This article examines eco-documentaries that employ the ethics of the face to engage with the notion of a universal human right to a healthy environment. Climate Refugees (Nash, dir Citation2010) and I Bought a Rainforest (Searle and Woodward, dir Citation2014) use close-ups of the human face to bear witness to environmental damage. They each emphasise a shared human right to resources and a safe environment, but in the process often enact colonial discourses that I Bought a Rainforest begins to critique. Terra (Arthus-Bertrand and Pitiot, dir Citation2015) uses the nonhuman animal face to emphasise an equivalency between human and nonhuman animals in their shared environmental vulnerabilities. Hija de la Laguna (Daughter of the Lake, Cabellos, dir Citation2015) initially withholds the face to depict the personhood of the environment itself from an Indigenous perspective. These different approaches to the face highlight anthropocentric tensions in the environmental human rights approach to ecological ethics.
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ItemMountain Arrow: Book 2 of Burning Days(MidnightSun Publishing, 2020-11)The River People and the Mountain People have survived for another season.
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ItemCreating new climate stories: Posthuman collaborative hope and optimism(Australasian Association of Writing Programs, )This paper considers an evolving project about climate change that will explore using collaborative creative writing strategies to emotionally support and engage writers, primarily focusing on how narratives of hope and optimism might counter affective responses of anxiety, and the resultant solipsistic inertia or surrender. We ask: what role could collaborative fiction play in helping to create positive futures that emotionally strengthen us to manage what may come and what already is? We outline the inspiration and background to our project and begin to theorise justification for applying posthuman approaches to the question of reimagining climate fiction. We review a number of collaborative climate change projects located outside of traditional writing but still drawing on narrative storytelling, and consider how our project – which focuses on genre fictions – might add to the horizon point; one that is not delusional, but also does not lead to dystopian despair.
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ItemThe Politics of Mestizaje in Contemporary Latin American Art(Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2023)This richly illustrated 120-page hardcover publication accompanies the stunning exhibition at Heide, showcasing a selection of significant works by contemporary Latin American and Australian artists. Featuring a curatorial overview by senior curator Melissa Keys, an essay by Dr Cristóbal Escobar Duenas, Lecturer in Screen Studies at The University of Melbourne, plus stunning installation views and a behind the scenes look into many of the artist’s studios, the publication explores the ways that art can take our imaginations beyond the limitations of the known world and the veil of visual appearances.
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ItemIs This How Participation Goes?(The Department of Visual Arts, University of California, 2019)If the neoliberal regime is a constitutive force in a decentered and globalizing world, then what is the starting point for determining its flows, and what is its impact on art and culture? Conversely, have we not also seen art swell and expand through new kinds of transnational collaborations that are giving aesthetic form to cosmopolitan ideals? Are artists at the vanguard of the resistance against the gaping inequalities threatening to rip apart the social fabric or are they, despite their democratising intentions, an extension of an invidious system? These contradictory forces are played out on many fronts and with divergent inflections. In this brief essay we sketch out the hydraulic tensions between the corporate global culture and mass cultural participation by focusing on recent events in Melbourne. As a second-tier global city, celebrated for its livability and cultural vitality, the development of Melbourne’s cultural scene over the last fifteen years exemplifies the various spatial formations around which aesthetic experience is being organized and redistributed.
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ItemGoverning creative industries in the post-normative cultural condition(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020-12-13)Contemporary cultural policy seeks to govern an increasingly complex terrain, one marked by rapid technological change, expanded channels for creative production and participation, global interconnectedness and social diversity, and a fluidity of cultural form. Through an analysis of Creative State, the first creative industries strategy in the state of Victoria, Australia, this article argues that the creative industries are, in part, a governmental response to the complexity of the cultural landscape. As critics have identified, these are ideological documents, often prioritising the economic benefits of culture over other forms of value. But they also reflect broader efforts to reconfigure government’s relationship to the cultural field, and to expand the set of actors involved in making culture. In this article we trace out these new relationships through the policy-making process, identifying its tensions and contradictions. Understanding the multi-sited, non-linear nature of policy forms the basis, we argue, for cultivating a generative cultural critique that might engage more productively with cultural policy, taking account of the plural and competing perspectives it must manage.
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ItemCapturing ambient participation: Indian Independence Day at Federation Square(Routledge, 2020)This chapter uses the concept of ambience as an analytical tool to explore the qualities of cultural participation in the outdoor public spaces of contemporary cultural precincts, and as a metaphor that speaks to a wider process of cultural transformation in communicative cities. Media-rich cultural precincts are now a common feature of urban developments and inform the major policy shifts in creativity-led urban regeneration. The ambient experiences afforded by outdoor cultural precincts resonate with significant shifts in artistic practice. Ambient participation is particularly difficult to account for in the instrumental frameworks and methods routinely used by cultural funders and stakeholders to evaluate the impact of cultural infrastructure. Frameworks designed to measure visitation numbers at a museum, the satisfaction surveys of audiences, or the segmentation and brand recognition indicators tested by market research frame cultural participation as an aggregation of individual experiences. Media-saturated environments make qualitative changes to the experience of being-together-in-public.
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ItemArchitecture, media and spaces of urban communication(Routledge, 2020)This chapter provides with buildings and material urban structures as symbolic resources that themselves “communicate” certain values, or about urban space as a “space of appearance” in which fundamental communicative processes of speaking and acting in public take place. The location of key buildings and their relation to each other gave material form to political hierarchy and social relations. The capacity for particular urban structures and material settings to endure over time has served to anchor social practices and political processes across generations, underpinning the assertion by architect Aldo Rossi that the built environment is a critical dimension of a society’s collective memory. The rise of urban planning as a profession, alongside the blunt force of developments in infrastructure engineering, transport and communication technologies, and, above all, the gravitational pull of profit-based urban development settings, all worked to reduce the capacity of architects to shape the modern city in practice.
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ItemSpaces of Communication(Routledge, 2020)This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores theoretical grounds of the “communicative city”. Gumpert and Drucker reconsider their formative definition and raise a series of questions and provocations concerning future research directions and approaches. The book focuses on the growing implication of digital media in contemporary practices of placemaking. Sun Wei explores the entanglement of embodiment and mediation in her account of the redevelopment of Sinan Mansions, while Christiane Brosius reflects on the complex urban ecology of Delhi through the work of two contemporary artists. The book focuses specifically on the communicative possibilities of a distinctive aspect of the contemporary media city, namely large video screens situated in urban public spaces. It also focuses more directly on the different ways that digital media platforms have become a new infrastructure shaping the contemporary communicative city.