School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemRacialized 'othering': the representation of asylum seekers in news media(Open University Press, 2005)An incident occurred off Australian territorial waters on 26 August 2001 that had significant consequences in the Australian parliamentary elections held that year. A Norwegian ship, the Tampa, rescued 433 survivors, mostly asylum seekers, from a sinking Indonesian ferry and took them to Christmas Island , part of Australian territory. Categorizing the rescued passengers of the Tampa as 'boatpeople' and 'illegal immigrants', the ruling Liberal Party sought to appeal to sections of the electorate by having Australian Special Forces board the ship in an attempt to stop the passengers from disembarking on Christmas Island - and thus being in a position to apply for asylum. What is of interest to our present concerns, however, is the role of the press in what subsequently came to be referred to as the Tampa affair. Some of the popular newspapers carried stories which reproduced the language of the government, as indicated in the headline in the front page of the Herald Sun on 31 August 2001: 'BACK OFF: Howard rejects UN call to take illegals'.
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ItemEthnicity, national culture(s) and the interpretation of television(Open University Press, 2000)Much of the academic debates concerning 'race', ethnicity and the media have been around issues of representation, power and identity, the constraints restricting minority broadcasting, and the aesthetics of resistance. While these provide various interrogations of the notions of 'race' and ethnicity, and are necessary interventions into the politics and economics of media representations and their hegemonic role in society, this chapter shifts the focus, attempting to explore a few of the current debates regarding both media and 'race' from the perspective of the audience, through the discussion of two studies which examine the interpretations of television programmes by ethnically and/or culturally diverse audiences. We will encounter, en route, the pertinence of 'tradition' in the explanations of understanding and interpretation in philosophical hermeneutics; developments in post-colonial studies and their relevance to notions of 'race' and ethnicity in the international context; and finally, a plea towards the need to revise the questions regarding the nature of cultural imperialism.
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ItemDocumentary meanings and interpretive contexts: observations on Indian 'repertoires'(Arnold, 1998)My main concern in this chapter is to elaborate on a particular aspect of a larger project examining the interpretation of environmental documentaries by audiences in India and Britain, the empirical part of which was designed to illustrate/substantiate theoretical interventions aiming to rectify a perceived lacuna in the attempts in communication research to make a connection between the socially culturally situated audiences and their interpretive practices. In this chapter, I isolate for closer inspection a specific strand from the web of data, with the intention of demonstrating both the presence of different interpretive repertoires in India, as well as the role of higher education as a relevant factor in the creation of these repertoires. This chapter examines the possible links between cultural contexts and the reception of documentaries, and interrogates en route the idea of culture as context. What is postulated here is a conceptualization of context based on phenomenological hermeneutics, which it is argued, accommodates the complexity and diversity of collectivities within 'national cultures'.
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ItemSoftware industry, religious nationalism, and social movements in India: aspects of globalization?(Garamond Press, 2002)Most theories of globalization have as their point of reference experiences in the developed world, thereby confining the debates to time-space compression or distanciation for example, or to quarrels about whether the world is becoming homogenous or heterogeneous. Such theoretical efforts are indicative of both the reoccupations of metropolitan academia, and also the lack of a cohesive theoretical thrust from the leftist intellectuals which takes into account developments in contemporary forms of global capitalism. The sometimes contradictory ways in which the diverse effects globalization are experienced or utilized in different parts of the developed world have come to academic and theoretical attention only very recently. Considering that the majority of the established canon of literature on the subject has been written by academics in the West, this is perhaps not surprising. However as indicated in the assumption that globalization is merely an extension of Western norms of modernity to the developing world, the almost total absence of any attempt to tackle the longstanding relationship between the West and the rest is worth noting, as is the similar neglect of social movements in several parts of the contemporary world which question the values underpinning aspects of globalization, and by doing so challenge the legitimacy of Western dominance.