School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemEntrepreneurial Labour: Chinese Housewife Influencer in TikTok Social Commerce( 2023)As social media marketing continues to expand, scholars (e.g., Kubler, 2023) have emphasised the significant role of social media influencers in effectively attracting attention, engaging in self-branding, and interacting with follower-consumers. In China, the rapid growth of e-commerce on social media platforms has led to the widespread popularity of social commerce influencers, especially on TikTok (Wang & Feng, 2022). Chinese TikTok housewife influencers represent a distinct group of female vloggers and social commerce influencers who have extended their private domestic chores into the digital sphere. How they conduct self-branding by leveraging their identities and to what extent this gendered practice impacts follower engagement and consumption are issues that remain to be explored. Therefore, the study employs semi-structured interviews as a qualitative approach to investigate follower-consumer narratives and consumption patterns related to housewife influencers. The study develops a self-branding model for TikTok housewife influencers and identifies three key motivations driving follower engagement and consumption: emotional attachment, perceived information value, and self-improvement. While housewife influencers seem empowered to manage and monetise their digital practices, they are still constrained by the platform economy and gendered social norms. Their digital entrepreneurship and follower consumption reflect the reinforcement of patriarchal values, neoliberal feminist ideals, and ongoing capitalist exploitation in China. These findings contribute to the fields of social commerce influencer strategies in marketing communication and gendered digital practices in media communication.
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ItemMale Idols in Women’s Cosmetics: The Chinese Fangirl consumer gaze, data labour, data wars and pseudo-feminist consumerism( 2022)Within the increasing marketing trend of young male idols endorsing beauty products that target women in China, Chinese fangirls have been demonstrating an impregnable purchasing power in consuming idol-endorsed products. Research by Tian Peng (2020) and Xiaomeng Li (2020) argue that this endorsement marketing phenomenon implies a certain level of women’s empowerment with the transition of power from the male gaze to the female gaze, however this argument fails to consider of the complexity and digital emergence of the Chinese fandom culture and the deeply engrained patriarchal social norms of China. Therefore, using feminist in-depth semi-structured interviews with six Chinese fangirls, this qualitative study analyses the relationship between the fangirls' consumption of idol-endorsed products and their commitment to the para-social relationship with their idol. It also seeks to understand whether women’s equality and empowerment is advanced by the consumption of idol-endorsed products. In contrast to existing research into women’s consumption of idol-endorsed products (Li, 2020; Peng, 2020) the findings of this study indicate that Chinese fangirls’ consumption of male idol- endorsed beauty products does not signify women’s equality and empowerment. Rather, it falls into “consumerist pseudo-feminism”, a phenomenon which superficially mimics some of the notions of feminism while remaining rooted in capitalist patriarchy. Notably, the study finds that fangirls’ consumption may contain exploitative capitalist features and that the gender power balance remains unchanged in this patriarchal setting. The study will give sociologists and marketers new insight into the nature of the fangirl to idol relationships in the male-endorsed beauty industry, which is deeply consumerist in nature, inherently tied to fandom culture, and does not contain feminist or empowering elements, as some scholars have claimed.
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ItemPrivacy Concerns about Personalised Advertising on Facebook in Cambodia: The Correlation between Privacy Concerns and the Privacy Paradox( May 2023)Over the last two decades, the media industry revolution has been transformed from a web-as-information source to a web-as-participation platform called ‘social media’. Social media platforms are broadly characterised by lower barriers to creating and distributing media content by users. Public and individual expression has tremendously contributed to digital footprints in aggregating personal data for behavioural prediction and personalised advertising on social media sites, for example, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. In the emergence of the digitalisation revolution, business models relied on digital platforms to communicate and connect with their customers’ communities through personalised advertising. Businesses have relied on social media’s personal data collection to understand a marketing predictive trend in which businesses can purchase access to segment and target audiences for personalised advertising. This personal data collection has triggered privacy concerns when individuals’ life details were collected and converted into digital data for the sake of industrial capitalism’s profits without users’ consent. To gain more insight into these issues, this study explored Facebook users’ privacy attitudes and behaviour towards personalised advertising. Additionally, the study evaluated users’ concerns about privacy-related issues and their understanding of personal data aggregation in relation to personalised advertising. To address this gap, this study focused on Cambodian university students aged between 18 and 39, and who were considered digital natives, public activists and e-commerce users. The data were collected through a mixed-method approach by conducting an online survey with 155 respondents and five in-depth semi-structured interviews. To gain comprehensive insights into consumers’ privacy attitudes and behaviours, survey data were analysed in conjunction with the interview results. The study indicated that most respondents were concerned about their personal information being aggregated and monetised by Facebook without consent. Most survey respondents never/rarely clicked on Facebook advertising formats such as photographs, videos, stories, messenger, carousel, slideshow, collection and playable advertising. However, survey and interview data divulged that they sometimes clicked on and engaged in influencer advertising because they regarded this content as informative, attractive and reliable for product review. The study discovered that respondents felt ambivalent towards personalised advertising and sometimes traded off their privacy to gain immediate benefits from that advertising. Their privacy decision-making process was affected by cost-benefit calculation, and it resulted in a ‘privacy paradox’, which depicts an individual’s intention to divulge personal information on social media despite stating privacy concerns. The results showed that most respondents understood how Facebook utilised their personal data for maximising advertising’s target audience, reach, direct advertising and tracking. However, while most participants appeared to understand the general strategies, they were less clear on precisely how their personal data were utilised for the technical operation of big data and algorithms, particularly Facebook Pixel and Facebook Offline Conversions. This study also suggests that future researchers should consider individuals’ socio-demographic factors—including age group, educational level, employment and income—to investigate their understanding of privacy-related issues on Facebook and the motives of advertising engagement and avoidance.
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Item(Re)defining recovery: exploring poetry as a therapeutic tool in recovery from severe mood episodes and associated suicide attempts in bipolar disorder( 2020)The critical component of this thesis explores the value of poetry as a therapeutic tool in recovery from severe mood episodes and associated suicide attempts in individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Through literary analysis of Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium and Jeanann Verlee’s Said the Manic to the Muse, I suggest that poetry allows a therapeutic space for dynamic reclamation of subjective narrative experiences of bipolar disorder from the medical discourse. Poetic devices such as personification and juxtaposition support the decentralisation of narrative in the subjective dialectic, thus creating scope for the productive tolerance of polarities, fragmentation and disorder. In doing so, poetry can facilitate emotional healing whilst eschewing redemptive narrative arcs. This provides valuable alternate readings and renderings of ‘recovery’ as part of an ongoing management of chronic mental illness which prioritises the experiential perspective, and thereby posits poetic process as a dynamic therapeutic tool in bipolar and attempted suicide contexts. The creative component of this thesis is a collection of poetry exploring my own recovery.
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ItemConceptual metaphor for COVID-19 in Australian newspapers( 2020)It is important to understand how news sources communicate information about pandemics to the public, and a central aspect of news is the use of metaphors. This study analyses cognitive frames and conceptual domains that metaphorically characterise COVID-19 as a concrete reality for the masses. Data were drawn from a corpus of Australian newspapers in the online Coronavirus Corpus (n.d.). Data were filtered, edited, and classified into three cohorts of corpora, each targeting one of three keywords: coronavirus, COVID-19, and virus. Through the KWIC tool and concordances in the cohorts, metaphoric linguistic expressions (MLEs) were identified. The textual analysis showed spreading and moving were the most common MLEs, followed by impede, force, drive, fight, and battle. The contextual analysis of the MLEs helped identify conceptual metaphors, such as COVID AS A MOVING ENTITY, COVID AS A WAVE, and COVID AS A KILLER. Based on the conceptual coherence between conceptual metaphors, four cognitive domains were classified: COVID AS A LIVING BEING, COVID AS A TSUNAMI, COVID AS A CRIMINAL, and COVID AS AN ENEMY. The findings differ slightly from previous research that found the WAR domain was a dominant source domain for disease metaphors, and many framing options for COVID-19 were used in Australian newspaper discourse. More research is required to better understand the representation of COVID-19 in media discourse to improve the government and public response.
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ItemThe impact of the Biennale of Sydney on the collecting habits of the Art Gallery of New South Wales( 2019)The aim of this research is to examine the impact of the Biennale of Sydney on the collecting habits of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. While there is research within the area of Biennales and their impact on local economies, there is little research into their impact on how local (in this context, Australian) art is collected by public (State or Federal) institutions, whose role it is to keep safe the culture of the locality they are meant to represent. Biennales are often researched in the context of the Global internationalisation of art, with the ‘type’ of art shown being known as ‘biennale art’ - often spectacular, internationalising, and heeding little attention to the context in which the art is being shown. It can be argued that eventually, artists in the areas where Biennales have become either a source of civic pride or a tourist destination for global visitors, tend to adapt their artistic styles to mimic the work of those artists shown in such arenas. In Australia, this raises questions on how Australian artists see themselves in an international context and how this impacts on national narratives. With this in mind, I am examining, as a case study, the collection of contemporary art in the Art Gallery of New South Wales in correlation with art exhibited in the Biennale, from six years prior to the Biennale’s inception through to Australia’s Bicentennial year of 1988.
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ItemWhen romance is dead: vampires in romance narratives for girls( 2018)In this thesis, I examine how the archetype of the vampire in Western literature continues to evolve within contemporary Young Adult vampire romance narratives. Building on Auerbach’s contention that vampires mutate according to the social demands of their time, I argue that the late twentieth and early twenty-first century proliferation of romantic vampire figures in Young Adult narratives for girls is a response to cultural anxieties concerning rapidly changing societal expectations of femininity following second-wave feminist movements in the twentieth century. I study three contemporary vampire romance narratives, Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Meyer’s Twilight (2005-2008) and Mead’s Bloodlines (2011-2015). Through my analysis of these texts, I demonstrate different ways in which the romantic vampire archetype has responded to Western anxieties concerning contemporary femininity, and I argue that the romantic vampire continues to evolve, drawing on conventions that have been set up in preceding vampire romance narratives to address changing social environments. The creative component of this thesis is an opening extract of a Young Adult vampire romance narrative titled The Blood Pact. In this extract, I explore ways in which the romantic vampire archetype can continue to transform in response to contemporary cultural concerns.