School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemHow to do things with sadness : from ontology to ethics in Derrida(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemWays of listening : dramaturgy as deep mapping in intercultural-Indigenous performance(University of Melbourne, 2010)
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ItemThe mediatization of Malcolm X( 2010)In the aftermath of the end of Cold War, the ideological restructuring that took place fundamentally affected the representation of one of the African American public figures of the 1970’s that was portrayed as deviant by the media and yet up that until that enjoyed time relative obscurity: Malcolm X. After the Spike Lee biopic, interest in his figure was rekindled albeit in an entirely new direction after the Watts Riots of 1992. Due to this shift, a cultural commodification of his figure undermined the subversiveness of his message and two decades later, there is still need for an extensive discussion to re-conceptualize the subtle reinforcement of hegemonic structures in the mediatization process and address the political context in the commodification of Malcolm X. In that vein. this article applies the notion of mediatization of the figure of Malcolm X on film and television as analyzed through the lens of cultural commodification.
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ItemWitnessing Australian stories: history, testimony and memory in contemporary culture( 2010)This thesis identifies and examines a new form of public memory-work: witnessing. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in response to the increased audibility of the voices of Australian Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers. Drawing upon theories of witnessing that understand the process as an exchange between a testifier and a ‘second person’, I perform a discourse analysis of the responses of settler Australians to the rise of marginal voices. Witnessing names both a set of cultural practices and a collective space of contestation over whose stories count as ‘Australian’. Analysing a range of popular texts - including literature, autobiography, history, film and television programmes - I demonstrate the omnipresence of witnessing within Australian public culture as a mode of nation building. Though linked to global phenomena, witnessing is informed by, and productive of, specifically national communities. From Kate Grenville's frontier novel The Secret River (2005), through to the surf documentary Bra Boys (2007), witnessing has come to mediate the way that people are heard in public, and how their histories and experiences are understood within cultural memory. Linked to discourses on national virtue and renewal, witnessing has emerged as a liberal cultural politics of recognition that works to re-constitute settler Australians as ‘good’ citizens. It positions Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers as ‘objects’ of feeling, and settler Australians as ‘gatekeepers’ of national history. Yet even with these limits, witnessing remains vital for a diverse range of groups and individuals in their efforts to secure recognition and reparation for injustice. Though derided under the Howard government as an ‘elite’ discourse, for a large minority of settler Australians witnessing has become central to understandings of ‘good’ citizenship. With the election of Rudd - and the declaration of two national apologies - witnessing has been thoroughly mainstreamed as the apotheosis of a ‘fair go’.
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ItemIdeal and real: illusion and reality in Stanley Milgram's accounts of the Obedience to Authority experiments( 2010)Through a close reading of Stanley Milgram's published and unpublished accounts of the Obedience to Authority experiments I will demonstrate that Milgram shaped the story of his research, excluding material that might subvert the positivist ideal. In the creative component, using unpublished qualitative material that Milgram gathered from his subjects during the course of his research, I will reclaim the stories of the silent, de-identified subjects and explore the experience of the experiment from their point of view. The two components of the thesis will work side by side to demonstrate the gap between official accounts of the experiments and what actually occurred and how Milgram constructed a credible narrative of his experiments that silenced competing narratives.
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ItemThe search for a narrative truth; a study of the reader as creative thinker( 2010)The creative component of this thesis, entitled ‘The Eagle Scouts of America’ is the beginning of a novel centred on a political scandal in 1970’s America. The narrator seems eminently reliable. He is unabashed in his telling of lies and plans to lie and manipulate, to the extent that the reader is inclined to believe and trust him. However, while the reader becomes guilty in participating in the deception, it does not occur to the reader that the narrator may be lying or manipulating them as well. Restrictions on the length of this thesis means only the first five chapters of the novel have been included. The theory component is a study of the features of unreliable narration and how readers need to respond to gain the most enjoyment and insight that this form of narrative has to offer. I suggest that, when the truth does not exist within the narrative itself, the reader is encouraged to think creatively and develop their own reader based narrative truth. Upon starting a new novel, which contains a first person narrator, the reader begins with the expectation, that the narrator will be truthful and accurate in their account. When this expectation is not fulfilled, the reader’s experience of the text and his or her role in relation to the text are reformed, not only permitting but requiring of the reader an engagement in creative thinking about the narrative. With specific reference to Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov and The Debt to Pleasure by John Lanchester, I look at the ways a reader can use what is contained in the unreliable narrative to determine for him/herself an understanding of the truth.
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ItemLocal news in global frames: media construction of the Kenya post-election violence( 2010)The study examines the impact of globalization on the reporting of political conflict in developing countries using Kenya as a case study. The globalization of news media in developing countries, particularly in Africa, has seen an increase of new actors in the public sphere. Internet accessibility continues to draw many people into the global public sphere. Radio, which is the leading source of news for most people in developing countries such as Kenya, has proliferated not just in major cities but also in the villages. Furthermore, newspapers, despite visible decline trends in circulation due to the challenges emanating from online news outlets, continue to be significant in the construction of political communication, especially during political conflict. In addition, television, though not accessible to most people in developing countries, increasingly broadcasts in “real time” because of the satellite technology that is now available across the continent. In addition, the increasing interdependence between developed and developing countries in news flow due to advanced news media technology appears to substantially transform newsroom routines and practices. For this reason, the reporting of political conflict is typified by non-journalists accessing and framing news stories in the public sphere. This complementary reporting – also a rival to mainstream journalism – is based on the justification of claims (and counterclaims) to local and global audiences. The outcome of these competing journalisms is the ‘priming’ of news stories by mainstream media, especially during political conflict as demonstrated in this research. The study employed a textual and cross-platform discourse analysis of Kenya’s two leading newspapers and mediated television clips sampled from five stations, local and global. The interpretive framework for this work is derived from Habermas’ Communicative Action. The principle finding indicates that local news media seem to adopt global news frames to justify local news reporting. In addition, the findings show that Kenya news media gave bad press to the warring factions during the 2007/08 political violence following a disputed presidential election result. This is because of the pressures of the 24/7 news delivery, market competition, increased interconnectedness between developed and developing countries and an increased local journalistic determination to promote human rights and values in countries such as Kenya.
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ItemNarratives of emergence( 2010)This thesis is a two-pronged creative and critical exploration of the mother-daughter relationship and female subjectivities as they emerge from or remain entwined within that relationship. Within this analysis, I also explore the tensions between female subjective crisis and agency, as they extend from the mother-daughter relationship. The critical component focusses on two autobiographical texts of twentieth-century French author, Violette Leduc. These texts, L’Asphyxie (1946) and La Bâtarde (1964), were originally published in French. However, I refer to the translations by Derek Coltman. Primarily, my questions investigate the ambivalence of the mother-daughter dynamic in Leduc’s texts and the impact of this ambivalence on female subjectivities. With the aid of object-relational theory and the psychoanalytic theories of Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray, I explore how Leduc’s psychological patterns inform her textual practice and narrative temporality. In doing so, I propose that Leduc’s writing conveys female subjective crisis as a manifestation of the psychic struggle between the unconscious influences of both the paternal and maternal imaginaries and her personal, human desires for liberation from homogenous and suppressive sex/gender categories. I conclude that through a process of writing that engages “negative narcissism,” mimesis, and transgressive sexuality as modes of resistance, Leduc negotiates a stronger sense of herself, as an empowered figure of resistance, both inside and outside the text. The creative component, Spin is an autobiographically based novella dealing with similar complexities in the mother-daughter relationship. I approach subjective crisis from multiple angles, in its relationship to embodiment, gender, sexuality, agency and desire. Set in contemporary Melbourne, the narrative is staged around the residual pain of familial dysfunction. I explore melancholic attachment, alienation and the ambivalence of the mother-daughter dynamic from the perspective of a daughter, struggling to escape the legacy of a disturbing Tasmanian childhood, with a mentally unwell, absent mother and a father with Asperger’s syndrome.
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ItemPower and counter-power in a global information age: public relations and new media technologies in China( 2010)Through interdisciplinary engagement with political-economic analyses of new media, the public sphere, public relations and environmental communication, this thesis examines the social implications of the Internet for the practice of public relations (PR) in China in both corporate and activist settings. The notion of power is introduced to posit the research within the broader theoretical framework of power-making in the ‘network society’ (Castells, 1996) by linking the discussion to critical perspectives on cyberpower (Hindman, 2009; Jordan, 1999), technocapitalism (Mosco, 2009; Schiller, 1999, 2007) and technostruggle (Dyer-Witheford, 1999; Juris, 2004; Kahn and Kellner, 2004; Kellner, 2004). Triangulating traditional and virtual ethnographic methods, fieldwork was conducted at the PR and Communications Department of General Electric Company (GE) China and a Chinese grassroots environmental NGO (ENGO) called the Global Village of Beijing (GVB). Development in Internet technologies, especially the rise of the so-called Web 2.0 applications, has renewed optimism within the PR industry and scholarship about the enhancement of interactivity, which is best embodied by the concept of two-way symmetrical dialogue proposed by James E. Grunig and Todd Hunt (1984). The Internet has also been hailed as a ‘potential equaliser’ (Coombs, 1998) that is capable of bridging the resource gap for activist organisations. Such generalisations lean towards technological-determinism and do not recognise the complex and organic relationship between technology use and its social context. The study offers ‘thick’ descriptions that both document the contextualised incorporation of Internet technologies into daily PR work and connect it with critical theory. It is found that Internet-based technologies are only capable of re-configuring the power balance to a limited degree. The corporate example shows that the interactive and dialogic potential of the Net has not been fully exploited, and most network strategies remain online extensions of one-way and two-way asymmetric PR models. The ‘potential equaliser’ (Coombs, 1998) thesis also proves weak given the resource shortage suffered by activists in constructing their online presence, which is exacerbated by the increasing commodification of information and attention in cyberspace that further disadvantages the resource-short. Nevertheless, it is also found that Internet technologies can assist activists in their self-representation, network building, information brokering, agenda setting, public mobilisation and construction of discourse communities. This demonstrates the counter information flow online in which civil society actors adopt the same network strategies to promote counter ideologies. To a certain extent, the activists’ online activities have contributed to the formation of an incipient and (electronically) mediated counter public sphere in China – a ‘green’ public sphere (Torgerson, 1999; Yang and Calhoun, 2007) that fosters a counter discourse, or ‘greenspeak’ (Harré, Brockmeier, and Mühlhäuser, 1999), to counterbalance fast-tracked neoliberal globalisation. The issues that hamper this process are also highlighted, including lingering resource shortage, the fragmentation of online discourse communities, and the marginalisation and ‘caging’ of environmental discourses. The study concludes that neither public relations nor the Internet can be reduced to simple generalisations. Both are dialectical concepts that reflect power contestations. The Internet is not a panacea that can transform public relations overnight and make it two-way symmetrical. It remains to be seen if interaction and dialogue will further enter the (corporate) PR psyche, although little optimism exists given the seemingly irreconcilable relationship between system organisations and discourse ethics. It would be equally mistaken to label online public relations as simply extending the discursive and symbolic power of the powerful, in light of the innovative online public relations strategies adopted by activists and NGOs to set agendas and communicate with their publics.
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ItemThe wings of active thought: a study of mind-travelling and voyage drama in early modern England( 2010)The purpose of this study is to explain how voyage drama works, and why playwrights wrote about travel and exotic settings. Criticism of early modern travel has produced first-rate studies of the colonial, mercantile, and pilgrimage mindsets, but playgoers did not leave the theatre with material acquisitions or spiritual fulfilment. Playgoing was primarily a pleasurable pursuit. Treating voyage drama as a vicarious travel experience yields new insights into early modern attitudes to travel and the nature of theatrical representation.