School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemImagining Taking Tiger Mountain (by strategy): two landscapes of the Anthropocene, 1970 and 2014(Informa UK Limited, 2023-01-02)The International Geological Congress has yet formally to adopt the Anthropocene. It is still, to that extent, an imagined epoch. The term ‘Anthropocene’ refers us to the deep time of geological epochs, but alternate terms for what we can expect to experience have a more specifically anthro-pological focus: the Capitalocene, Chthulucene and Misanthropocene. Only Entropocene breaks with the humanistic tradition. Comparing Tsui Hark’s 2014 The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhiqu weihu shan), the second adaptation of Qu Bo’s adventure novel of the People’s Liberation Army, with the 1970 film of the Peking Opera version directed by Xie Tieli, demonstrates the stakes in imaginations of mountains separated by 45 years. This paper argues that the later film evolves from the failure of the Cultural Revolution’s imagination to encompass the landscape of its setting. The increased incoherence of the later film derives from its increased engagement in technical mediations, which in turn enable a complex interaction between utopian Revolution and dystopian Anthropocene imaginaries.
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ItemDisability and Screen Work in Australia: Report for Industry 2023(Melbourne Disability Institute, University of Melbourne, 2023-02-16)Disability is a key vector of inequality in Australian society. The screen industry has the potential to create meaningful change, in our workplaces and working practices, for our colleagues and our audiences. We need to pay more attention to disability and take more action to include disabled people in our industry. Experience of disability is widespread in Australian society. Nearly 1 in 5 people live with disability.[1] Disability should be commonly discussed and accommodated within the screen industry. Without efforts to create this change, the screen industry will continue to drain talent and entrench disadvantage. Disabled people working in the screen industry have diverse impairments, conditions, and access requirements*. Despite this diversity, many disabled workers share common experiences of stigma, exclusion and discrimination. This is because ableism is built into the structures of our society and our industry, from how we talk about disability every day to how we design schedules. Disabled people experience a more precarious, lower paid, and less powerful position in the screen industry than their non-disabled counterparts. Disabled screen workers routinely experience prejudice. These experiences suggest structural problems across the screen industry and its culture. They reflect a lack of understanding of disability and a reliance on negative stereotypes of disabled workers. Interviewees commonly noted that they experienced more diverse and inclusive work cultures in other industries. Overwhelmingly, survey respondents called for greater awareness and understanding. Attitudes and inflexibility were repeatedly identified as key barriers. This means that the first steps towards change should be focused on people and everyday practices. Disability equity, inclusion and accessibility training tailored to the screen industry can make a significant impact. Consultation, innovation and funding can transform industrial structures to create a more inclusive and sustainable industry for all screen workers. We must normalise talking about and providing access requirements to support disabled workers. The findings of this research reflect the need to build greater understanding, transparency and accountability in order to fully include disabled workers in the Australian screen industry.
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ItemQuick Trust and Slow Time: Relational Innovations in Disability Performing Arts Practice(Pluto Journals, 2022)In the last decade, the field of Disability Arts has been recognised as a powerful source of aesthetic innovation. Yinka Shonibare has described it as ‘the last remaining avant-garde movement’ (Bragg, 2007), where artists with lived experience of disability produce new combinations of form, content and politics, which engage spectators in provocative reflections on the way we relate to each other in the public sphere. Despite a range of policies, plans, protocols and funding programmes to support disabled artists and collaborations between mainstream producers and disabled artists, the statistics – at least in our context in Australia – suggest most disability art still occurs outside and alongside an industry that struggles to include these artists. In this article, we draw upon findings from a series of workshops with disabled artists around Australia, conducted as part of the ARC funded Disability in the Performing Arts in Australia: Beyond The Social Model project – known colloquially to its collaborators and participants as ‘The Last Avant Garde’ project (https://lastavantgarde.com.au) – to propose a new approach. We find that while provision of logistical access (ramps, hearing loops, interpreters) and ideological access (stories, characters, discourse and language) is critical, so is methodological access, which embodies disability culture in training, rehearsal and production processes. Disabled artists use crip culture, along with relational space and time to negotiate what happens in disability arts and culture production practices and work through desire, fear, vulnerability and reciprocity to rapidly establish trusting collaborations. It is inclusion of disability culture relationships and concepts, as much as ramps and inclusive language, that makes a practice feel safe for disabled artists – and this, we argue, is what the mainstream sector has to learn and what the disability arts sector has to teach about improving the inclusivity of the creative industries.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAfter Years of Austerity, Revive Writes the Next Chapter in Australian Literary Culture(Melbourne, 2023-01-30)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableIntercultural research: Aboriginal young people and the digital storytelling process as knowledge exchange(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022-12-13)In this chapter, we discuss a digital storytelling project conducted over three years with a cohort of 10 Aboriginal young people. The participants were alumni of the Korin Gamadji Institute (KGI). KGI recruits Aboriginal young people from across southeast Australia (mainly Victoria) to take part in an Aboriginal youth leadership programs. Two workshops were conducted at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), located in central Naarm/Melbourne, where young people acquired new digital skills and were exposed to a range of sophisticated media-making technologies. The final workshop shifted to Camp Jungai, a place of cultural significance for the Victorian Aboriginal community, where participants were able to experiment with mobile technologies (iPads and apps) and explore story-making in a community-based space. As a longitudinal study, the digital storytelling workshops exposed our developing intercultural research agenda as it progressed throughout the project. Researchers worked closely with KGI and the young participants to learn from them about their ambitions for the project, including young people's capacity to create innovative digital stories that reflected their identities and culture, alongside their lived experiences and ideas for the future. As an intercultural research project, the digital storytelling workshops revealed the significance of two-way learning and of supporting Aboriginal led programs to promote Indigenous knowledge exchange as an essential component in nurturing Aboriginal young people's connections to their culture and identity.
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ItemEthnic community media can play a key role in a crisis – but it needs our support(The Coversation, 2022)
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ItemRobot death care: A study of funerary practice(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2021-07-01)Across the globe, human experiences of death, dying, and grief are now shaped by digital technologies and, increasingly, by robotic technologies. This article explores how practices of care for the dead are transformed by the participation of non-human, mechanised agents. We ask what makes a particular robot engagement with death a breach or an affirmation of care for the dead by examining recent entanglements between humans, death, and robotics. In particular, we consider telepresence robots for remote attendance of funerals; semi-humanoid robots officiating in a religious capacity at memorial services; and the conduct of memorial services by robots, for robots. Using the activities of robots to ground our discussion, this article speaks to broader cultural anxieties emerging in an era of high-tech life and high-tech death, which involve tensions between human affect and technological effect, machinic work and artisanal work, humans and non-humans, and subjects and objects.
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ItemCybernetic Funeral Systems(IEEE, 2021-01-01)Using Postphenomenology (one of many methods informed by Wiener's cybernetics) as an analytical approach, this paper examines three examples of robot participation in, and mediation of, funerals. The analysis of robot mediation of funerals challenges the idea that death rituals are exclusively human performances and experiences, and instead repositions them as cybernetic systems of entanglement and impact. The paper begins with an introduction to the relevance of postphenomenological theory, then moves to the case of CARL, a robot that enables remote participation in funeral ceremonies. We argue that the [Human-Robot-Funeral] relation and its variants are both engaging and alienating, through revealing-concealing, magnification-reduction and a more generalised enabling-constraining. Technological mediation is also evident in the case of Pepper, a robot that has officiated at funerals as a Buddhist monk. We describe similarities and differences in the way CARL and Pepper manifest the [Human-Robot-Funeral] relation. The final example is AIBO, a companion robot that becomes the locus of a funeral ritual. This offers a radical case that directly challenges humans' self-proclaimed exceptional ontology.
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ItemThe disposition of the destitute(Council to Homeless Persons, 2019)The final disposition is a term used by people in the funeral industry to refer to the burial or cremation of a dead person. The final disposition is a profoundly important event, not simply a pragmatic or material process, and its significance is expressed through ritualised performances. The disposition and its rituals are shared and communal, involving ceremonies attended by the deceased’s family, friends, and community, whilst less indirectly the disposition is shared by wider social norms and values around the proper treatment of the deceased body. Although the disposition is common to us all, then, it is also a personalised event in which the particularity of the life lived is recognised. Similarly, the place of interment, whether body or ashes, is named and marked to recognise the individual life of the deceased. Places of interment are thus not only identified, but are also accessible to family, friends and community, for the purpose of ongoing visitation and remembrance.
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ItemChen Yanyin: Giving Form to Emotion(ShanghART Gallery, 2016)