School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSignifying dissent: The sensory semiotics of protest(SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD, 2024-01)Public protests need to communicate their aims to an audience, and the audience must make sense of the message. Initially this article was planned as a visual analysis of protest signs and placards. But to avoid ‘reproduc[ing] the privileged position of sight and vision over other ways of knowing’, we attend to the contested relations between signification, power, and all the senses. The sounds, smells, sights, tastes, and textures found at protests by groups such as Extinction Rebellion, Occupy, and the gilets jaunes, and on issues including women’s rights, nuclear power, immigration detention, Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccination mandates. Through ethnographic documentation of protests and the ‘live’ coverage broadcast in social and news media, our investigation of activities, scenes, signs, and participants reveals, firstly, that public dissent communicates through multiple sensory dimensions, and, secondly, that the senses of street-based protests are inextricably intertwined with sensory control tactics used against protesters in the policing of events.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableSmall Things in Everyday Places: Homelessness, Dissent and Affordances in Public Space(OXFORD UNIV PRESS, 2023-05-05)Abstract In ‘a world that has been built to accommodate only some’ (Ahmed 2019: 221), how do those engaging in public protest or experiencing housing insecurity make use of the material environment? In this article, we examine adaptation of the built environment in four sites in Melbourne, Australia. Everyday urban places are composed of myriad ‘small things’ acted upon as affordances for survival within structures of silencing and dispossession for the urban undercommons. We draw from cultural, spatial and atmospheric criminology to inform an ethnographic method focusing on materiality, use, adaptability and sensory composition. In so doing, our research contributes to criminological understanding of the significance of ‘minor’ events, activities and encounters in everyday life by proposing that ‘small things in everyday places’ constitute potentialities for defiance and resistance.
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ItemNo Preview AvailablePerceptions of Safety Among Taxi and Rideshare Service Patrons: Gender, Safekeeping And Responsibilisation(Queensland University of Technology, 2022-01-01)Rideshare and taxi services may commonly be perceived as safer modes of travel, particularly in comparison to public transport, and the introduction of rideshare services such as Uber has transformed urban mobilities. Yet, there is emerging anecdotal evidence to suggest that both taxi and rideshare services are sites of sexual harassment and violence. However, little is known about passengers’ perceptions of safety when using taxis and rideshare services, an issue with significant implications for mobility, civic participation and social inclusion. To address this gap, we explore findings from an online survey and one-on-one interviews with rideshare and taxi patrons to examine their perceptions of safety when using taxi and rideshare services and the factors that facilitate or impede feelings of safety, including the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. In closing, we consider the implications of the findings for conceptualisations of safety, developing policy and practice, and future research.
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ItemVisible Homelessness in a “Liveable City”: Municipal Responses to Homelessness in Melbourne(Wiley, 2020-04-16)Despite considerable national and urban prosperity, significant numbers of Australians are homeless. How local governments engage with homelessness has significant implications for the homeless population. In recent years, municipal strategies have inclined towards the maintenance of public order at the cost of the rights of homeless individuals. In this article, we investigate the approach to homelessness proposed by the City of Melbourne in 2017, which centered on the expansion of powers to remove individuals and the confiscation of possessions, testing the council’s claims as to the impact of visible homelessness upon local businesses and upon other users of public spaces.
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ItemOn visible homelessness and the micro-aesthetics of public space(SAGE Publications, 2019)In this article, we investigate the circumstances that have produced the current municipal regulatory approach to homelessness in the City of Melbourne, Victoria, and the ways in which visibly homeless people are policed through a micro-aesthetics of their presence in public space, which involves the monitoring of their bodily demeanour and their physical possessions. Our study contributes to and draws from a range of debates, including studies of the governmental conjunction of poverty and crime, analysis of the co-implication of law and spatiality, research on the criminalisation of homelessness and homeless people, and the burgeoning criminological interest in the significance of the visual field for our understandings of crime and criminality. This article recounts how homelessness, public space and questions of aesthetics have recently coalesced in debates about the regulation of homelessness in the public space of Melbourne’s city centre. It approaches the issues through comparative consideration of genres of municipal management frameworks in other jurisdictions, detailed textual consideration of the Protocol on Homelessness in the City of Melbourne and an empirical study of visible homelessness in the public places of central Melbourne.
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Item'Art in the Streets: Place, Genre and Encounter'(Kai Hansen Trykkeri, 2018)
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ItemIllicit interventions in public non-spaces: Unlicensed images(University of Toronto Press, 2018)
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ItemThe Scene of Violence: Cinema, Crime, Affect(Routledge-Cavendish, 2009)
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ItemStreet Studio. The place of street art in Melbourne(Thames and Hudson, 2010)
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ItemImages in the aftermath of trauma: Responding to September 11th(SAGE Publications, 2007)An event such as the attack on Manhattan on September 11th 2001 is socially, culturally and politically traumatizing. Those who saw the attack (in person or through media coverage) emphasized its visual impact. Faced with such visual trauma, it is unsurprising that the aftermath of the attacks had a representational dimension, as individuals and institutions strove to suture the resulting wound through image making. This article investigates the legacy of visual trauma after September 11th in the difficult interim years when disaster is no longer part of the immediate past. I focus on two texts (the Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, or 9/11 Report, and a short film by the Mexican director, Alejandro González Iñárritu), each of which displays in different ways the effects of the trauma of witnessing disaster. The aim is to raise questions about the legacy of traumatic events for the legal and cultural responses which follow in their wake, and to that extent the article thinks through the demands of witnessing trauma, the ethical challenges for the cinematic documentation of a traumatic event, and the limits upon judgment in the aftermath of disaster.