School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemApathy: Disaffection, Enthusiasm, Fanaticism(C. Hurst and Co., 2023)Charity, community, duty, and struggle are good – not only sanctified and rewarding but also good in themselves. And yet the evidence is that society at large is losing and devaluing commitment to others: we live in times diagnosed as consisting of social pathologies and a-pathologies – where, curiously, apathy is taken as a variant of, rather than existing in opposition to, pathology. Fascinated, for obvious reasons, with their diminishing share of trust, older print and broadcast news media have exhaustively analysed the rise of social media bubbles and echo chambers, trolls, and splenetic outbursts, discovering that the profitability of these emergent media forums depends on the speed and energy of their communications, and that unsurprisingly, anger sells. Aggrieved fury would appear to be a dominant emotional state of our times. More reflective commentators, including William Davies in the UK and Joseph Vogl in Germany – both acknowledging the same condition where ‘knowledge becomes more valued for its speed and impact than for its cold objectivity, and emotive falsehood often travels faster than fact’ – observe that it can generate an emotional state in which ‘otherwise peaceful situations can come to feel dangerous, until eventually they really are’.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableUnderstanding gendered transnational education mobility: Interview with Fran Martin(SAGE Publications, 2023-12-01)In this interview, Fran Martin discusses gendered transnational education mobility in relation to research methodology, the contradictions of neoliberal ideology, and the social implications of ethnographic research. Challenging stereotypical and often biased portrayals of Chinese international students in the Anglosphere, Martin argues for the importance of attending to the irreducible details of individual life experiences and explains how to employ affective methods to convey these details to readers. Calling for attention to gender as a key perspective in understanding education mobility, she discusses how the global neoliberal discourse underpinning this form of mobility can be restricting and empowering at the same time. She also reflects on the ways in which researchers could engage with social and policy realities and contribute to improving international students’ well-being.
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ItemBeyond the smart city: a communications-led agenda for twentyfirst century cities(Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2023-06-27)Digital media technologies, from networked sensors to large video screens and mobile devices, have become pervasive urban infrastructure in the twentyfirst century. The dominant framework for understanding the integration of digital technology into urban space has been smart city discourse. In this article, I will argue that this framework, as it has so far been articulated, is inadequate to maximizing the social potential of digital urban infrastructure. Digital urban infrastructure not only changes how cities look, but how they function as social settings. I will propose the ‘communicative city’ as an alternative framework for thinking about digitally mediated cities. The communicative city offers an opportunity to consider networked urban space as a test case in which key problematics of contemporary globalized media are materially instantiated. It is the frontier zone at which everyday experiences of embodied media and new forms of communicative agency collide with powerful logics of tracing and tracking, and the widespread deployment of new forms of automation and machine learning as techniques of urban governance.
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ItemSilence(Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology., 2023)Silence is a common occurrence in everyday social interactions, yet anthropological research, like most research in the social sciences and humanities, has mostly focused on what people say and do. Over the last couple of decades, however, there has been an increased attention to how the unsaid, the unspeakable, and the invisible shape social, political, and subjective worlds. In particular, anthropologists have theorised silence as more than just the opposite of speech. They have started to think of silence as a complex moral, affective, and social force. Anthropological rethinking of silence and voice has been particularly prominent in feminist traditions, in the study of care, and in decolonial scholarship that often studies silence as refusal and resistance. Attending to histories of silence and silencing has a potential to provide insights into different forms of structural oppression under which individual and collective strategies of survival might be falsely interpreted as mere compliance. Silence has also been important in research on ritual activity, where it is a prerequisite for communicating with ancestors, spirits, ghosts, and other apparitions. Here, silence can co-create a sense of hauntings as a response to repressed past and present forms of violence and harm. By attending closely to the unspoken and unspeakable aspects of language and art, anthropologists increasingly find new ways to include silences in their research and modes of representation. In these and other ways, the study of silence can greatly enrich our understanding of the social world.
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ItemAn Archive of 'Feelings' @ 20: An interview with Ann Cvetkovich(SAGE Publications, 2023-02)Feminist and queer studies scholar Ann Cvetkovich’s trailblazing book An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures has had an immense influence on the field of memory studies, inspiring new bodies of scholarship on queerness, trauma, and memory. In this interview, Cvetkovich discusses the impact that some of the book’s central concepts have had on the field of memory studies over the last 20 years. Cvetkovich also reflects on the role that An Archive of Feelings has had in bringing affect into feminist and queer work on sexuality, intimacy, and everyday life. Furthermore, she reflects on another of her groundbreaking books, Depression: A Public Feeling, in which she applies queer cultural analysis to unusual archives and writes critical memoir in order to situate depression as an historical category. The interview closes with Cvetkovich’s reflections on her current work on queer Indigenous approaches to trauma.
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ItemQueering and decolonising the museum: 'In the Presence of Absence' exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2023-02)This review engages with the recent ‘In the Presence of Absence’ exhibition (2020–2021), which was held at the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art (Amsterdam, the Netherlands). By focusing on three artistic interventions included in the exhibition (Werker Collective’s ‘A Gestural History of the Young Worker’, Farida Sedoc’s ‘The Future Ain’t What it Used to Be’, and Jennifer Tee’s ‘Tampan Ship of Souls #2’ and ‘Tampan the Collected Bodies’), we aim to highlight ways of creatively queering and decolonizing artistic practices and spaces, including museums and conventional memory narratives.
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ItemAffective silences: Violence, heteropatriarchy, intergenerationality(Wiley, 2023-12)Personal experiences of violence are often shrouded in silence, which can be perceived both as a form of ongoing violence and as a powerful method of resistance in and of itself (Rich, 1979). Feminist academics, public intellectuals, and activists have continually argued that speech is the foremost means of achieving equality and empowerment (Ahmed, 2017; Lorde, 1984). Feminist scholarship has also been invested in exploring the generative possibilities that silences can engender (Malhotra and Rowe, 2013), and anthropologists have called for an understanding of silence, particularly in the aftermath of violence, as “a descent into the ordinary” that allows for a repair of the self through the quiet inhabitation of an everyday “gesture of mourning” (Das, 2007, 77; Samuels, 2023; Shohet, 2023).
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ItemQueering memory: Toward re-membering otherwise(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2023-02)This editorial introduction provides a theoretical framework for analyzing relationships between gender, sexuality, and memory. Using the concept of queering memory, the special issue proposes queering memory as a practice of innovative and generative history-making that has the capacity to reorder time and memory. The contributions collected in this special issue take up the notions of “queer” and “queering” in their multiple forms, not only in reference to gender and sexuality but also as disordered, non-normative, and subversive potentialities that unsettle power relations. Building on this approach, the contributions engage with art, archives, museums, television, performance, philosophy, and cultural artifacts to explore how queering memory can serve as a strategy for building alternative narratives that impact which memories are privileged and which are hidden or silenced.
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ItemBuried Treasure: Journey into deep time(Griffith Review, 2022)Over the entire 800,000-year record, atmospheric carbon dioxide has never peaked over 300 ppm. For all of human history, it sat around 275 ppm until about 200 years ago, when we began to dig up and burn coal to fuel the Industrial Age. In 1950, it punched through the 300-ppm historic ceiling. In mid-May, as the forests of the Northern Hemisphere dropped their leaves, the planet exhaled atmospheric carbon dioxide at a new daily record of 421 ppm.
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ItemPNG’s Women in Waiting(Melbourne University Publishing (MUP), 2022)The two women, venerable grandmothers and veteran activists, are plotting revolution and dissecting the exercise of feminine power in Papua New Guinea over plates of fish and chips and salad.