School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAustralian Coal Theatrics(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2023-03)Climate change was the defining issue in the 2022 Australian federal election. As a new administration takes power, all sectors, including the performing arts, need to keep up the pressure. An iconic moment of “coal theatrics” in Parliament House, so labeled by the Australian media, stands in contrast to artistic performances that continue to put pressure on the framers of political and cultural policy.
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ItemThe Slipperiness of Name: Biography and Gender in Australian Cultural Databases(Wiley, 2023)In this article, we examine and historicise problems related to name and gender in biographical and cultural databases. Combining theoretical and computational approaches to onomastics, we identify contradictory naming conventions, intriguing patterns and distinct institutional vestiges in the recording and representation of artistic careers. We evaluate the affordances and constraints of naming conventions in Australian cultural databases, considering evolving trends in data collection and use, in relation to the complex lives of individual artists. We argue that this local-level analysis extends to wider transnational debates in historiography, gender studies and digital humanities research today and propose some conceptual and technical solutions for building and using cultural databases in the future.
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ItemKnowing the Maghreb in Stuart Scotland, Ireland and Northern England(Wiley, 2023-11)On 6 August 1709, the Dublin Intelligence reported that Dutch negotiators in Ottoman Algiers ‘were received, treated, and dismissed by the Algerines, with more civility than could be expected from those Infidels, who delight chiefly in Rapine and Blood.’ The article's byline named its source as the prestigious London Gazette, ‘Published by Authority’ by the Whitehall Secretary of State's office out of well-regarded consular correspondence networks. However, no such article appears in that publication. Instead, this article's final form was a Dublin creation, reflecting an ongoing confrontation between long-standing, fearful prejudices and new diplomatic and economic realities. This disconnect was not new in English-language media: from the 1660s onwards, London papers repeatedly reported frank surprise at peaceful treatment from Algerians, Tunisians, Tripolitans, and Moroccans (hereafter Maghrebis) following the establishment of directly-negotiated peace treaties and the (moderately peaceable) colonization of English Tangier in 1662. But no London paper ever described their surprise in such stark terms, and newswriters' wonderment declined and disappeared by the late 1670s, towards a steady assurance of cooperation and courteous treatment violated not by eternal, implacable opposition but by recognizable and negotiable diplomatic and military disputes. This change reflected both real diplomatic conditions and changes in local attitude, wrought by more frequent direct encounters and a great deal of detailed, up-to-date information about real conditions issuing from London presses. This paper probes how similar new knowledge reached new form in English-speaking areas far from London – Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Newcastle – where global mercantile interests, early Enlightenment thinkers, and imperial ideologues began stepping forth into a burgeoning English/British Empire, bringing with them associations and imaginations of the Maghreb, Ottomans, and Islam dating back centuries. I explore the historiographies of encounters and perceptions, touch on early-modern direct encounters and local Irish and Scottish print representations, before more carefully examining early eighteenth-century periodical news.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableCOVID-racism on social media and its impact on young Asians in Australia(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-05-04)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableZama and the Politics of Contamination: from Di Benedetto's Novel to Martel's Film(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-01-02)
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ItemIntroduction: Silent Reverberations: Potentialities of Attuned Listening(Wiley, 2023-12-01)
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ItemGet In and Get Out: White Racial Transformation and the US Gothic Imagination(MDPI AG, 2023)This article examines the Gothic trope of White racial transformation in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). These seemingly disparate texts both feature White men who turn Black via supernatural body hopping or experimental surgery. In these texts, Blackness acts as an emotional and material resource for White characters that perversely bolsters Whiteness by escaping it. Little-known outside of antebellum specialisms, Sheppard Lee enhances our understanding of race in the Gothic by considering why Whiteness may be rejected in the early nation. Written in the context of blackface minstrelsy, the novel transforms downwardly mobile Sheppard into an enslaved man as a respite from the pressures of economic success. Get Out builds on its nineteenth-century precursors by showing the Black body as a desired and necessary vessel for the “post-racial” White American self, who swaps their physical Whiteness for Blackness to extend or enhance their own life, turning Black men into extensions and enforcers of White middle-class culture. In uniting these texts through the lens of critical Whiteness studies, this article argues that White racial transformation is a long-held tradition in the US Gothic that not only expresses White desires and anxieties, but itself transforms in each specific historical racial context.
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ItemWhat’s in a Name?: A Cross-Section of Biography, Gender & Metadata in Cultural and Performing Arts Databases(DC Papers, 2023-10-01)In this paper, we present preliminary findings about issues identified by the Australian Cultural Data Engine (ACD-Engine) related to name and gender metadata practices, with a focus on the Design & Art Australia Online database (DAAO), and implications that extend to Australian cultural databases more broadly. Grounded in the history, context and specifics of data entry and management, we identify specific naming conventions, metadata contradictions and distinct institutional vestiges in the recording and representation of artists’ careers. Using theoretical and statistical approaches, we categorize the types of variant names, showing a marked (but expected) contrast between men, women and non-binary individuals. By examining the affordances and constraints of naming conventions, we give attention to evolving trends in Australian data collection and use as they relate to the lives of individual artists. We argue that this local-level analysis is potentially applicable to wider transnational debates in humanities research and propose some new conceptual and technical approaches to the collection and use of biographical metadata in cultural databases.
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ItemPixel, Partition, Persona: Machine Vision and Face Recognition in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun(Open Library of the Humanities, 2023)This article examines the relationship between machine vision, face recognition and affect in Kazuo Ishiguro’s speculative fiction novel Klara and the Sun (2021). It explores the ways that Ishiguro’s novel enacts, stages, and dramatises cognitive and emotional acts of comprehension and empathy through ‘face reading’. The article takes up Guillemette Bolen’s theorisation of ‘kinesic imagination’ and Sianne Ngai’s concept of ‘ugly feelings’ to investigate the affective and representational dilemmas of technological face recognition in speculative fiction. Through the careful treatment of literary language, itself a complex response to rapidly evolving technology, Klara and the Sun presents instances of affective subtlety, hesitation, ambiguity, mutability, confusion and deficit to solicit an emotional response in the reader concerning the sociotechnical reception and future possibilities of machine vision and facial recognition technologies. In this way, Ishiguro’s novel offers a timely challenge to the algorithmic design principles of face-recognition technology due to its complex affective (rather than purely categorical) treatment of both human and non-human faces.
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ItemForgetting and remembering the Irish famine orphans: A critical survey(Irish Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand, 2020)A decade ago, while researching family history, Richard Olive of Melbourne was pleased to discover shipping records that revealed his great-grandmother, Johanna Sullivan from County Cork, had arrived in Adelaide in September 1849 on the Elgin. Noticing that she was only 15 years old, he began to search the records for her parents, only to find, to his surprise, that all the 190 passengers on the ship were teenage girls. As Richard drove his granddaughter, Eva, home from school that afternoon, he told her about his discovery. She asked him in what year Joanna Sullivan had arrived and, when he replied '1849', they both quickly realised that this was during the Great Famine. Eva said: 'Sounds to me like she was an Earl Grey orphan'. But, although Richard knew his Australian history well, he had never heard of Earl Grey-beyond it being a type of tea. Eva told him that she had come across the Earl Grey orphans in a novel she had recently read: 'Bridie's Fire', written by Kirsty Murray and published in Sydney in 2003.