School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemThe face of the environment: environmental human rights on screen(Taylor and Francis Group, 2023-01-02)This article examines eco-documentaries that employ the ethics of the face to engage with the notion of a universal human right to a healthy environment. Climate Refugees (Nash, dir Citation2010) and I Bought a Rainforest (Searle and Woodward, dir Citation2014) use close-ups of the human face to bear witness to environmental damage. They each emphasise a shared human right to resources and a safe environment, but in the process often enact colonial discourses that I Bought a Rainforest begins to critique. Terra (Arthus-Bertrand and Pitiot, dir Citation2015) uses the nonhuman animal face to emphasise an equivalency between human and nonhuman animals in their shared environmental vulnerabilities. Hija de la Laguna (Daughter of the Lake, Cabellos, dir Citation2015) initially withholds the face to depict the personhood of the environment itself from an Indigenous perspective. These different approaches to the face highlight anthropocentric tensions in the environmental human rights approach to ecological ethics.
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ItemCreating new climate stories: Posthuman collaborative hope and optimism(Australasian Association of Writing Programs, )This paper considers an evolving project about climate change that will explore using collaborative creative writing strategies to emotionally support and engage writers, primarily focusing on how narratives of hope and optimism might counter affective responses of anxiety, and the resultant solipsistic inertia or surrender. We ask: what role could collaborative fiction play in helping to create positive futures that emotionally strengthen us to manage what may come and what already is? We outline the inspiration and background to our project and begin to theorise justification for applying posthuman approaches to the question of reimagining climate fiction. We review a number of collaborative climate change projects located outside of traditional writing but still drawing on narrative storytelling, and consider how our project – which focuses on genre fictions – might add to the horizon point; one that is not delusional, but also does not lead to dystopian despair.
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ItemIs This How Participation Goes?(The Department of Visual Arts, University of California, 2019)If the neoliberal regime is a constitutive force in a decentered and globalizing world, then what is the starting point for determining its flows, and what is its impact on art and culture? Conversely, have we not also seen art swell and expand through new kinds of transnational collaborations that are giving aesthetic form to cosmopolitan ideals? Are artists at the vanguard of the resistance against the gaping inequalities threatening to rip apart the social fabric or are they, despite their democratising intentions, an extension of an invidious system? These contradictory forces are played out on many fronts and with divergent inflections. In this brief essay we sketch out the hydraulic tensions between the corporate global culture and mass cultural participation by focusing on recent events in Melbourne. As a second-tier global city, celebrated for its livability and cultural vitality, the development of Melbourne’s cultural scene over the last fifteen years exemplifies the various spatial formations around which aesthetic experience is being organized and redistributed.
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ItemGoverning creative industries in the post-normative cultural condition(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2020-12-13)Contemporary cultural policy seeks to govern an increasingly complex terrain, one marked by rapid technological change, expanded channels for creative production and participation, global interconnectedness and social diversity, and a fluidity of cultural form. Through an analysis of Creative State, the first creative industries strategy in the state of Victoria, Australia, this article argues that the creative industries are, in part, a governmental response to the complexity of the cultural landscape. As critics have identified, these are ideological documents, often prioritising the economic benefits of culture over other forms of value. But they also reflect broader efforts to reconfigure government’s relationship to the cultural field, and to expand the set of actors involved in making culture. In this article we trace out these new relationships through the policy-making process, identifying its tensions and contradictions. Understanding the multi-sited, non-linear nature of policy forms the basis, we argue, for cultivating a generative cultural critique that might engage more productively with cultural policy, taking account of the plural and competing perspectives it must manage.
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ItemThe Practice of Being Human: Narrative Medicine and Cultural Representation(St. Cloud State University Digital Archives, 2020)Narrative medicine may take certain methodological cues from literary studies, linguistics and narrative theory, but until now it has remained firmly grounded in the health sector. It views storytelling and narrative as tools that can improve the performance of medical practitioners – first, by helping them process the confronting nature of their everyday jobs, and then by facilitating more effective communication with patients. Narrative competence thus provides an important supplement to the medical gaze, enhancing the clinical experience for practitioner and patient alike. But narrative medicine also has important implications from a literary point of view. It highlights the special position that the medical worker occupies in terms of being able to observe a cross-section of society. When a medical practitioner decides to engage not only with the scientific method of evidence-based medicine but also in the arts-based practice of narrative medicine, he or she has the opportunity to make an intervention in the broader culture. Consequently, the literature that emerges almost as an offshoot of narrative medicine is capable of creating forms of representation that more accurately reflect the heterogeneity of social conformance. It is a literature that draws attention to demographic sectors of society that might otherwise be denied mainstream representation. This essay examines the ways in which a medical practice can inform a writing practice, and vice versa. Using the work of Chinese-Australian author Melanie Cheng as a case study, I show how narrative medicine traverses an important space between the medical gaze and the empathetic instinct. Cheng has worked as a General Practitioner (GP) for over ten years, whilst developing a parallel writing career. Her debut collection of short stories, Australia Day (2017), functions on one level as a therapeutic outlet for Cheng’s day job. In addition, by recasting the GP as a repository of secrets, her stories provide matchless insights into the lives of people from a range of different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Cheng’s writing therefore transcends the boundaries of her own personal history and ethnicity, pointedly venturing beyond the territory expected of her as a Chinese-Australian author. Viewing Cheng’s work through the lens of her medical training shows us how the practice of medicine can work alongside that of writing to deepen our understanding of what is commonly referred to as the ‘human condition’.
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ItemHealth tracking media and the production of operational space: A critical analysis of Qantas Wellbeing App(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2023-01-01)This article examines the production of operational space amidst the rise of self- and data-tracking media, through the case study of the Qantas Wellbeing App. We draw on the operational paradigm in media studies to envisage how the Qantas Wellbeing App is embedded in the social-material relations between its users and the app, and the broader data-platform economy. By conceptualising the Qantas Wellbeing App as an operational media, the inquiry focuses on its designs and techniques that prompt users to fulfil prescribed tasks and follow instructions. We follow Lefebvre's conceptualisation of the production of space to evaluate three sets of social relations reconfigured by the Qantas Wellbeing App: human-to-human, human-to-machine, and data-to-data. By relying on qualitative evidence collected from an auto-ethnographic approach, our analyses focus on (1) spatial practices and (2) social relations constructed around the Qantas Wellbeing App between the authors to argue that social space is becoming a programmed reality that adheres to the logic of technological automation. Our analysis here affirms the app's capacity and objective to modify human behaviours and to evaluate how the app has recalibrated the authors’ respective and shared social spaces to create the needed condition of behaviour changes among the users. As social space is centred around human relations and activities, human agency and lives become secondary in an operational regime, which relies on data synchronisation to prosecute for the operational space and life.
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ItemDead Europe and the Coming of Age in Australian Literature: Globalisation, Cosmopolitanism and Perversity(Australian National University, 2013)This essay uses Christos Tsiolkas’ 2005 novel, Dead Europe, to re-examine the traditional binary established between old Europe and new Australia. The definition of cosmopolitanism put forward by Tsiolkas takes into account charges of Eurocentricity laid against the concept itself, as well as reflecting on the ways in which cosmopolitanism changes given the accelerated processes of twenty-first century globalisation. In Dead Europe, Tsiolkas links Australia to a pan-European history, bringing national borders into question and broadening notions of Australian identity. I argue that Tsiolkas’ novel is a key example of a recent coming of age in Australian literature - the shift away from Australian national identity as inward-facing, naïve and rural-based, towards a more mature, urban, outward-facing understanding of Australians as culpable participants in global culture.
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Item#MeToo, Cisheteropatriarchy and LGBTQ plus Sexual Violence on Campus(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2023-01-01)This article examines two case studies related to LGBTQ disclosures of sexual violence on university campuses, in the US and Australia. We argue that in a landscape of mediated #MeToo discourse, LGBTQ testimonies are often mapped onto a cisheteropatriarchal framework which limits adequate institutional responses to LGBTQ experiences of sexual violence. We illustrate how resolutions are often imagined via individualised empowerment narratives, and how this works in concert with the cisheteropatriarchal framing to delimit responses to sexual violence. We consider alternative possibilities for accounting for LGBTQ experiences going forward, and how institutions like universities might better respond to these issues.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAn Artist Speaks the intellect travels in many different directions: Talkin' with Eleo Pomare (1937-2008)(Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2023-04-17)This interview with Eleo Pomare focuses on his role as the choreographer of mature creative works that intermingle with his formation as a Black artist and activist after he returned from Europe to live and work in New York in the mid-1960s. It begins with discussion of his creative work in the community during the period of the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights. Pomare reflects upon his early training and choreographic experiments as well as describes the construction of some of his best-known performance works. He ends with some thoughts on political advocacy and his influence on dance policy and dance criticism, and throughout the conversation Pomare shares insights about his philosophy as a Black dance artist.
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ItemFighting off the bulldozers in the sacred kwila forests of Papua New Guinea(Guardian News & Media Limited, 2022-10-09)Villagers are pushing back against logging operations they say are encroaching on designated conservation areas.