School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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Item(Im)mobile precarity in the Asia-Pacific(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2019-11-02)If on a global scale, our late-modern era is marked by intensifying mobilities of many kinds, then Asia as a geo-cultural region exemplifies this trend in particularly forceful ways, with large mobile populations including permanent migrants, refugees, international students, labour migrants, young travelers, as well as well-developed cross-border networks of mobile media technologies, products, talents, and finances. Our starting point in this article is the idea that these intensified mobilities sketched are transforming people’s experiences of everyday life and subjectivity in Asia and beyond. The increased regionwide ‘mobilisation’ of economic, social and cultural life seems likely to transform people’s senses of place and movement; experiences of labour; everyday affective and embodied sense of self; gendered, sexed, raced and classed subjectivities; visual and media cultures; youth cultures; cultures of consumption, and more. This raises a plethora of theoretical and empirical questions for a regionally focussed cultural studies. How frictionless are these intensifying flows: which borders and blockages mould the new, transnational experiential geographies that are taking shape? Which populations are advantaged by increased mobility, and which minoritised? What new inequalities emerge as a result of intensifying mobilities–and how do people live with, resist, and creatively negotiate these inequalities at the micro-level of everyday practice? And what will ‘Asia’ come to mean in the emergent reconfigurations of place, geography and identity being wrought by intensifying mobilities? In order to lay the conceptual groundwork for the special issue, this article begins by tracing the interconnections between three of our key terms–(im)mobilities, precarities, and borders–in conversation with the relevant theoretical scholarship on these concepts across a range of disciplinary fields. This leads to the theorisation of a new concept that articulates these connections: (im)mobile precarity.
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ItemIntroduction: Australia in the field of trans-Asian media flows(SAGE Publications, 2020-02-22)Although it has long been considered a non-Asian country located in Asia, Australia is increasingly linked to Asian media circuits, and the rise of the Asian media industries is changing Australian media culture. At the level of consumption, Asian media content – from Bollywood film to Japanese TV to Chinese online video to Korean social media and K-pop – is now more readily accessible than ever to media users in Australia due to broadband connectivity and mobile media technologies, as well as (more unevenly) via mainstream commercial distribution. This increased access is not only helping Australia’s Asian migrant populations maintain cultural ties; it is also creating new media tastes for the general Australian audience. Meanwhile, at the level of production, Australian governments, keen to harness the potential for the country’s involvement in the region’s expanding media industries, are exploring new ways to support Australia’s screen media industries by establishing regional partnerships. This Special Issue of Media International Australia grows out of a collaborative research project funded by the Australian Research Council to explore the cultural and industrial implications of these unfolding developments. It seeks to understand how these intensifying media flows across Asia, and including Australia, are transforming the cultural identities of Australian audiences and media products.
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ItemAustralia’s ‘Asian Century’: Time, Space and Public Culture(Japan Focus, 2015-02-10)In this essay we consider ongoing public-cultural discussions about Australia’s situation in ‘the Asian century’ as symptomatic of a conjunctural moment in Australian social life: a historical phase that is given distinctive shape by the convergence of the discourses of paranoid nationalism and free-market (inter)nationalism. We argue that the co-existence of these two (deeply contradictory) imaginaries as the dominant available rubrics for configuring ‘Australia’ and ‘Asia’ in relation to each other results in a profoundly impoverished understanding of current conditions. We propose that an account of some very differently configured relationships between ‘Asia’ and ‘Australia,’ drawn from people’s material experiences of everyday cultural life, can provide resources for those interested in thinking beyond the hyperbole of economic opportunism and the paralysis of paranoid nationalism. We begin by briefly considering ostensibly progressive innovations in governmental and public-cultural framings of the Asia-Australia relationship since the late twentieth century–– ‘Asia as market’ and ‘Asia literacy’––before turning to some stories that we argue offer much richer resources. These stories include our remembered experiences of late 20th-century Australian children’s media––always-already infused with a certain Japanese flavor. We also consider the contemporary translocal experiences of Asian Australians, Chinese international students in Australian cities, and Asian-Australian media and research collaborations. Such phenomena, we argue, constitute Australian social life as translocal and inter-cultural, thereby fundamentally challenging the presumed radical separateness of ‘Australia’ from ‘Asia’ on which currently dominant framings of Australia’s situation in the ‘Asian century’ are founded.
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ItemRefuge 2016 Evaluation Report(The University of Melbourne, 2017)
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ItemNew Media in Singapore’s Creative Economy: The Regulation of Illiberal Pragmatism(Routledge, 2016-01-05)This Handbook addresses the historical, social, cultural, political, philosophical, artistic and economic dimensions of the region’s new media.
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ItemInvestigating Wellbeing Outcomes: The Melbourne Recital Centre(The University of Melbourne, 2016)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableChinese & Indian Australians: queer, here and in need of Safe Schools(O L Society Limited, 2016)
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ItemArts and Cultural Precincts in the Age of Participation(Asian Urban Lab, 2016)
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ItemMulticulturalism and Governance: Evaluating Arts Policies and Engaging Cultural Citizenship: 4 Year Project Report(Research Unit for Public Cultures, The University of Melbourne, 2015)
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ItemConnecting Audiences: A Manual for Large Screens(The Research Unit in Public Cultures, The University of Melbourne in association with Federation Square, Art Center Nabi & Australia Council, 2015-06)