School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    Children's Digital Picture Books: Readers and Publishers
    Day, K (Routledge, 2024-04-01)
    During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, children’s media use increased (Mesce et al. 2021) while a decrease in print-book reading was observed (Nolan et al. 2022). An increase in tablet use suggests that when children were reading, it was mostly online in the form of ePub3 pdf files for illustrated works and prescribed school texts, while smartphone use was linked to apps and games. (Susilowati et al. 2021) For many years now, children’s publishers have experimented with digital picture-book formats but have regarded the genre as not suitable for digitisation. This book documents the findings of a one-year research project engaging the children’s publishing sector for feedback on reading trends and digital publishing in picture-book genres. The research assesses the plight of picture books in the current climate and considers how picture-book publishers cater to diverse readerships and new reading platforms post Covid-19 lockdowns and into the digital age. Written by an academic and editor with over 15 years industry experience, this book offers a nuanced response to children’s picture book publishing and reception for librarians, teachers, publishers and international scholars in the fields of publishing studies, library studies, early childhood studies, early education and childhood psychology.
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    Communicative Cities and Urban Space
    McQuire, S ; Wei, S ; McQuire, S ; Wei, S (Routledge, 2021)
    Cities have long been recognized as key sites for fostering new communication practices. However, as contemporary cities experience major changes, how do diverse inhabitants encounter each other? How do cities remember? What is the role of the built environment in fostering sites for public communication in a digital era? Communicative Cities and Urban Space offers a critical analysis of contemporary changes in the relation between urban space and communication. This volume seeks to understand the situatedness of contemporary communication practices in diverse contexts of urban life, and to explore digitized urban space as a historically specific communicative environment. The essays in this book collectively propose that the concept of the ‘communicative city’ is a productive frame for rethinking the above questions in the context of 21st-century ‘media cities’. They challenge us to reconsider qualities such as openness, autonomy and diversity in contemporary urban communication practices, and to identify factors that might expand or constrict communicative possibilities. Students and scholars of communication studies and urban studies would benefit from this book.
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    A visceral history of bread: from First-Nations Australia to Byzantium
    Nelson, R (museum of innocence, 2023-06-30)
    An unseemly squabble arose between Byzantium and Rome in the eleventh century over the kind of bread that should be used in the sacrament. The azyme controversy, as it is known, was so acrimonious and silly that scholars still struggle to explain something so trivial erupting to the point of schism. This book reverses the normal line of inquiry: instead of asking what we can say about a futile argument over bread, it asks what useful things does the polemic tell us about bread itself? The Byzantine dispute is one of many telling examples where bread attracts conceited and headstrong narratives, commencing with the false belief that certain cultures were too primitive to have developed techniques for baking bread—like the ancient traditions of First-Nations Australia—and ending with zealous dieticians today who want to abolish wheat in the pantry. Dwelling especially on the symbolic prestige of bread in the Christian epoch, this book identifies visceral historical patterns, where the more bread means to people and their institutions, the more it becomes subject to anxieties over symbolic proprietorship. There are many jealous regulatory impulses around the spiritual flourishing of bread; but none of them makes sense without appreciating the underlying viscerality attached to our affection for one kind of bread or another, or a given ritual for eating it. In order to analyse the several reactions to bread and its myths, the book proposes a history of viscerality, which invokes several contemporary themes related to dietary anxieties and a fear of bread. The book narrates how bread—at various times and for different tragic reasons—can lose its innocence.
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    Women Photographers of the Pacific World, 1857-1930
    Maxwell, A (Routledge, 2020-02-13)
    This is the first book to examine the lives and works of women photographers active in the settler colonial nations of the Pacific Rim from 1857–1930. The few histories of women’s photography that have been written so far have been confined to developments in Britain, France, Germany and the USA, and have overwhelmingly focused on artistic photography, ignoring the whole area of commercial photography. Taking 12 case studies as representative of the many women who entered the profession between 1857 and 1930, this book deals with both early 20th-century artistic and ethnographic photography in the region and 19th-century commercial photography. In addition to asking how female photographers coped with the pressure of being women in a male-dominated profession, what was new about the techniques and methods they deployed, and the kinds of artistic visions they brought to bear on their subjects, it breaks new ground by asking how they responded as photographers to the on-going decimation and displacement of indigenous peoples as white settlement and capitalism became ever more entrenched across the new world territories of the Pacific Rim, and photography more influenced by the international art movements of Pictorialism and Modernism.
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    Indigenous Law and the Politics of Kincentricity and Orality
    Kearney, A ; Bradley, J ; Dodd, V ; a-Marrngawi, DN ; a-Muluwamara, MT ; Dimanyurru, GF ; a-Karrakayny, A (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023-05-10)
    This Palgrave Pivot strives to recount and understand Indigenous Law, as set within a remote community in northern Australia. It pays close attention to the realpolitik and high-level political functioning of Indigenous Laws, which inspires a discussion of how this Law models the relational, influences governance and emplaces people in an ordered kincentric lifeworld. The book argues that Indigenous Law can be examined for the ways in which it is a deliberate, stabilizing and powerful force to maintain communal order in relation to Country, a counter framing to popular and ‘soft law or soft power asset’ visions of such Laws often held in the national and international imaginary. It is the latter which too often renders this knowledge esoteric and relinquishes it to a category of lore or folklore. This is an open access book.
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    Provocation in Women's Filmmaking Authorship and Art Cinema
    Loreck, J (Edinburgh University Press, 2023-03-31)
    Critics regularly use the term "provocateur" to describe controversial film directors. Although most individuals who attract this term are men, there is a long and largely unexamined history of female auteurs who shock and unsettle their viewers. Provocation in Women’s Filmmaking: Authorship and Art Cinema investigates how women directors participate in the tradition of provocative art cinema. Focusing on the post-millennium films of auteurs such as Lisa Aschan, Catherine Breillat, Jennifer Kent, Isabella Eklöf, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Claire Denis, Anna Biller and Athina Rachel Tsangari, this book considers the aesthetics and strategies of women’s provocative filmmaking in contemporary cinema. Challenging the gendering of provocation as a hyper-masculine mode of authorship, the book uncovers an enticing and complex array of divisive works by women.
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    Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2
    Rust, S ; Monani, S ; Cubitt, S ; Rust, S ; Monani, S ; Cubitt, S (Routledge, 2022)
    This second volume builds on the initial groundwork laid by Ecocinema Theory and Practice by examining the ways in which ecocritical cinema studies have matured and proliferated over the last decade, opening whole new areas of study and research. Featuring fourteen new essays organized into three sections around the themes of cinematic materialities, discourses, and communities, the volume explores a variety of topics within ecocinema studies from examining specific national and indigenous film contexts to discussing ecojustice, environmental production studies, film festivals, and political ecology. The breadth of the contributions exemplifies how ecocinema scholars worldwide have sought to overcome the historical legacy of binary thinking and intellectual norms and are working to champion new ecocritical, intersectional, decolonial, queer, feminist, Indigenous, vitalist, and other emergent theories and cinematic practices. The collection also demonstrates the unique ways that cinema studies scholarship is actively addressing environmental injustice and the climate crisis. This book is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of ecocritical film and media studies, production studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies
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    Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West
    Martin, F (Duke University Press, 2022)
    In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad, between expectations of fulfilling traditional roles as wife and mother versus becoming highly educated and cosmopolitan career-oriented individuals.
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    Fairweather and China
    Roberts, C (Melbourne University Publishing, 2021-08-03)
    He lived and worked in China for extended periods, learnt Chinese and published a book-length translation of the popular Chinese novel The Drunken Buddha (1965).
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    Imagination and Invention
    Simondon, G (University of Minnesota Press, 2022)
    Here, in English translation for the first time, is Gilbert Simondon’s fundamental reconception of the mental image and the theory of imagination and invention. Drawing on a vast range of mid-twentieth-century theoretical resources, this book provides a comprehensive account of the mental image and adds a vital new dimension to the theory of psychical individuation in Simondon’s earlier, highly influential work.