School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 367
-
ItemHow to do things with sadness : from ontology to ethics in Derrida(University of Melbourne, 2010)
-
ItemWays of listening : dramaturgy as deep mapping in intercultural-Indigenous performance(University of Melbourne, 2010)
-
ItemDaryl Lindsay : vision for Australian art(University of Melbourne, 2008)
-
ItemThe characterisation of oil paintings in tropical southeast Asia(University of Melbourne, 2008)
-
ItemCosmopolitanism and fictionality in eighteenth-century literature : Montesquieu, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Oliver Goldsmith(University of Melbourne, 2007)
-
ItemDivide and embody : the moment of putting pen to paper in J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello novels(University of Melbourne, 2007)
-
ItemA fragile thing : marketing remote area Aboriginal art(University of Melbourne, 2005)This dissertation examines the marketing of Australian Aboriginal art from remote area communities with a particular focus on the new marketing practices that have evolved in response to government policies. I will argue that the pressures to achieve economic sustainability are leading art centres to put greater emphasis on business rather than artistic development. Indigenous communities do not view art centres solely as businesses, but as mechanisms for cross-generational and cross-cultural communication. I will argue that the marketing of their art is a means of communicating their culture to a broader audience as well as creating employment opportunities within their communities. Chapter 1 defines the role of art centres, examines the contribution of art centres and arts advisors in the marketing of Indigenous art, and explains the role of different tiers of government in creating the infrastructure for the Indigenous art market. Chapter 2 argues that the economic rationalist perspective disregards the cultural, social and environmental issues facing Indigenous communities. It traces the shaping of the Indigenous tine art market through government policy and funding programs, Then it examines the impact of government funding arrangements in skewing community priorities through three funding scenarios: the development of a culture centre, withdrawal of government subsidy from an art centre and the exhibition Balgo 4-04. Chapter 3 surveys approaches to the marketing of art that achieve cultural outcomes rather than business results recounting examples of innovative marketing from Warlayirti Artists Aboriginal Corporation (WAAC), which were initiated with both business and cultural objectives. Chapter 4 explores the motivations of Indigenous communities in establishing art centres. It traces the history of Turkey Creek and the formation of the Warmun Art Centre and its marketing strategies. Chapter 5 addresses the economic issues faced by art centres in competing with private dealers in the marketplace. This study reveals the uniqueness and fragility of art centres operating in remote areas. I argue that the art centres' existence, and the fundamental role they play in maintaining the integrity of the market place through their marketing strategies, is threatened by the business model. In so doing, I question the current direction of government policy.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableVisualising Loss: An Analysis of Imagery in Social Media and News Media Used to Portray Mass Shootings( 2022-12)A large range of amateur and professional images are uploaded on social media and news websites in the aftermath of mass shootings. Participatory publics witness violent attacks and memorialise their victims by sharing images of these events. Recognising these images as integral components of visual culture, this thesis investigates the themes and tropes that emerge among social media and news media images of shootings. It interrogates the prevalence of graphic violence within this body of images, notes differences between news and social media images, and seeks to clarify the processes whereby images are filtered by professional gatekeepers. This thesis includes a visual analysis of images gathered from Facebook, Instagram and news websites, and interviews conducted with news professionals in decision making roles. The images analysed here are drawn from three mass shootings that occurred in Pakistan, New Zealand and America, and demonstrate image use in varied socio-cultural contexts, across the global north and the global south. Mediatization is used as a framework for considering the interplay between media and socio-cultural environments. Image sharing involves the use of dominant visual tropes such as ‘pray-for’ images. Themes and tropes exist on different levels of analysis with visual tropes falling under themes that reflect existing typologies contributed by Fishman, Hanusch, and Abidin. There were several key findings. Firstly, solidarity, iconicity and resistance emerge as key themes in social media images. Second, traditional gatekeepers overestimate the presence of images of graphic violence on social media. While traditional publication values persist, newer globalised tensions around how news media work in relation to social media have emerged as images trending on social media often dictate the contents of images in the news media. Third, photographs are the dominant medium among news and social media images but social media afford users the opportunity to participate in image production in ways that reflect their own experiences. Finally, gatekeepers filter images to ensure compliance with editorial guidelines however decision making is highly subjective and is based on assessments of multiple, interconnected, overlapping and sometimes contradictory factors which call for nuanced judgements.
-
ItemCinema as a Disabled Body: Disrupting the Aural, Visual, and Kinetic Body of Film( 2022-10)“Cinema as a Disabled Body: Disrupting the Aural, Visual, and Kinetic Body of Film” is anchored by the provocative assertion that cinema is an inherently disrupted form and, despite ableist assumptions about how it sounds, looks and moves, it is specifically and importantly a disabled body. Focusing on a range of contemporary films released in the 21st century, this dissertation offers close formal analysis of the aural, visual, and kinetic elements of film to give resonance, shape, and movement to the disruptive cinematic body. This analysis prioritises the formal body of cinema in favour of on-screen representations and proposes that film form itself can be heard, seen, and felt as disability representation. Listening, looking, and moving with this disruptive cinematic form offers a different kind of body that can be found in disruptions to lighting, camera focus, framing, camera angle, sound fx, noise, music, voices, silence, editing, on-screen gestures, and camera movements. This is an original refiguring and reimagining of the cinematic body and the first scholarly analysis to define cinema as a disabled body. It also offers a productive re-scripting of how we frame and talk about disability and disruption. “Cinema as a Disabled Body” is a conscious shift away from understanding representation through character development, dialogue, and narrative and instead turns towards the cinematic body as a site of engagement. The cinematic body is defined as the technical apparatus of the film that informs how the film looks (lighting, framing, camera angle, focus), sounds (sound fx, noise, music, voices, silence), and moves (editing, on-screen gestures, camera movements). “Cinema as a Disabled Body” seeks to de-prioritise the notion of film as a “whole” and instead emphasise the disparate and composite elements that exist underneath the myth of a complete, synchronised, and seemingly able cinematic body. This dissertation is both a close analysis of cinematic disruption and an act of disruption itself that seeks to challenge the ableist gaze of film scholarship and reveal the value of listening, watching, and moving with a different body.
-
ItemMasculinity, Violence, and the Failure of Patriarchal Values in the Fiction of Cormac McCarthy( 2022-10)This dissertation examines Cormac McCarthy’s concerns in his fiction with how American patriarchal, hegemonic masculine values fail to deliver their promised benefits to men. I argue that McCarthy is critical of the way cultural myths around manhood exacerbate in these men what he sees as a propensity toward violence as a means of control.Through an analysis of McCarthy’s manipulation of form, including his evocation and interruption of mythic narrative structures and recognisable character typologies, I assess the extent to which McCarthy distances himself from or aligns himself with the violent and misogynist masculinities he portrays. I also examine McCarthy’s attitude toward representation, language and narrative as adequate mechanisms for structuring human life and whether his presentation of American masculine ideals as linguistically generated allows for a more ameliorative reading of his fiction. Crucially, I consider the fact that the suffering of women is generally portrayed as subordinate to the suffering of men. I find McCarthy’s fiction to be still beholden to many core characteristics of hegemonic white American masculinity, in particular its tendency to centre itself in narratives of suffering and survival–and so I propose that any critique of white American masculinity in his works must only be seen as partial.