School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemThe six faces of piracy: global media distribution from below(Greenwood Publishing Group, 2008)In current debates about media piracy, illegal copying either looms large as scourge and scandal or is talked up as the way of the future. This essay seeks to shift the focus away from the ethics of piracy and towards its broader contexts - its legal history, its economic functions, and its implications for information distribution on a global scale. Through a series of six different readings of piracy (piracy as theft, free enterprise, free speech, authorship, resistance, and access), I argue that we should understand it as, among other things, an alternative distribution system for media, one of considerable complexity and potential. Piracy's "cockroach capitalism" seeks out profits in markets untouched or underserviced by formal media institutions, providing in many cases the only available forms of film culture. From this perspective, piracy is not simply, or not only, a form of deviant behaviour but may also offer routes to development and cultural citizenship.
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ItemSecret lives of Asian Australian cinema: offshore labour in transnational film industries( 2008)This article examines some of the material dimensions of Asian Australian cinema through an analysis of selected regional production and post-production flows since 1980, and the debates surrounding them. It begins with a theoretical discussion of the role of labour within the global film industry, before moving on to consider controversies around the offshoring of film production to lower-cost destinations. Specific examples of production relays between Asia and Australia are analysed in the context of models of cultural labour offered by Toby Miller et al. and Ben Goldsmith. The author proposes a definition of Asian Australian cinema that seeks to attend to cross-border collaboration at a variety of levels and to render visible 'below-the-line' Asian Australian interfaces that do not necessarily register on screen.
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ItemCrimes against urbanity: the concrete soul of Michael Mann(Taylor and Francis, 2008)This article examines the contemporary crime film's reimagination of urban space. Through a case study of selected films by Michael Mann, it argues that the extreme stylisation of certain postmodern crime texts functions to aestheticise the industrial infrastructure of late capitalism, and that the genre offers a visual training through which generic sites of commerce, transit and industry (non-place) may be personalised, rendered habitable, and potentially reclaimed.
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ItemGentrification, cultural policy and live music in Melbourne(University of Queensland, 2006)This paper examines the regulation of nightlife in Melbourne, with a focus on live music venues. Widespread gentrification of the city centre and inner suburbs has recently created considerable tension between residents and venues. Under pressure from both sides, the state government established the Live Music Taskforce in 2003, and its findings resulted in a semi-formal — albeit largely symbolic — policy reorientation towards the protection of existing music venues. Through a case study of the Live Music Taskforce policy development process, the author argues that the Bracks government's creative cities development strategy and its overriding economic motivations have, in this instance, intersected with the broader cultural needs of Melbourne. However, such productive intersections can in no way be assured by creative industries planning models, whose interest in cultural activity is conditional upon its economic value.
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ItemCreative industries and informal economies: the case of Nigerian video(Sage, 2009)Since the emergence of its video industry in the 1990s, Nigeria has become the largest film producer in the world by output. Its informal economy now provides around two thousand films a year for a pan-African audience, and the industry has grown rapidly without assistance from the state, NGOs, or the film festival circuit. This article analyses the rise of ‘Nollywood’ through the lens of current debates in media studies. The Nigerian video economy offers compelling evidence for the role of informal markets in creating efficient and economically sustainable media industries. Its success also has implications for current debates around copyright and media piracy. I conclude that reading Nigerian video as a creative industry represents a useful way to rematerialize media studies in the overdeveloped world.