School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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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.
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ItemThe Screen of the Crime: Judging the Affect of Cinematic Violence(Sage Publications, 2009)Discussions of screen violence polarize around the question of whether images can cause people to behave differently. Proponents of this position point to the influence of images in other contexts; its critics reject the implication that individuals can be so simplistically motivated. Such debate is intensified by events such as the Columbine or Virginia Tech shootings, where cultural products are named as the causes of lethal violence. This article engages with the assumption that the violence in violent imagery is a relatively homogeneous category. It explores paradigms of cinematic violence through the analysis of exemplary scenes from four representative films ( The Matrix, Reservoir Dogs , Natural Born Killers and Elephant), each of which has been linked to violence flowing in and from the image. Each shows multiple killings in highly graphic ways, yet each deploys different representational techniques to produce a range of affective responses in the spectator. As such, the article seeks to answer the question of how to judge the affect of cinematic violence and to investigate the implication of the spectator in the affects and aesthetics of screen violence.
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ItemLegal/Illegal: Street Art in Australia(National Gallery of Australia, 2010)
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ItemOur Desires are Ungovernable: Writing Graffiti in Public Spaces(SAGE Journals, 2006)Our aim in this article is to contribute to the body of research on graffiti by considering some of the hitherto hidden aspects of graffiti culture. Drawing on detailed interviews with graffiti writers, we examine four main themes: motivations for graffiti writing; thresholds dividing ‘art’ from ‘vandalism’; writers’ reactions to ‘blank’ surfaces; and graffiti’s relation to other types of crime. We orient our discussion towards the affective dimensions of the activity in the hope that the words of writers become a visible and productive presence in urban (and academic) space.
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ItemJudging the Image: Art, Value, Law(Routledge, 2005)
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Item"Into the Blue": The Image Written on Law(Duke University Press, 2003)