School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe Quantified Self and beyond: Design guiding discourse in human/data assemblages( 2022)This thesis examines the emergence and growth of the quantified self. The quantified self has developed from a loosely organised, internationally distributed group of self-experimenters advocating for data-driven approaches to everyday life to a catch all descriptor which reframes broader practices of self-tracking in a way that downplays its controlling a/effects on human subjectivity. This popularisation of self-tracking, as a eudaemonic praxis in contemporary digital culture has seen the emergence of a generative discourse which shapes the conception, design, and implementation of data-garnering sociotechnical systems. In the thesis, I argue that if interdiscursivity across different situated contexts of self-tracking is foregrounded then some of its underacknowledged material a/effects can be brought to light. As self-tracking practices are introduced and assimilated into many facets of our everyday lives, the intensities of self-tracking become portable, and normalised, across contexts bringing with them complex, dialectical notions of control and freedom. To better understand this tension between control and freedom, within and across sites where self-quantification is occurring, I use two research strategies: (1) examining existing analytical frameworks for understanding the relation between discourse and materiality developed in the area of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and adapting them for application within a Critical Data Studies approach to studying self-tracking, and (2) assembling and analysing data that has been collected from documented traces of self-tracking technology design, development and use—including discourses reflecting first-person accounts, newspaper and magazine articles, social media content, patents, technical documentation, marketing material, and published research across a range of disciplines. Taking an approach informed by Critical Data Studies (CDS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS), I trace the emergence of the quantified self as a means of describing a range of self-experimental practices and consider how it becomes portable to other settings. I do this through four case studies which examine relations of freedom and control in: the Quantified Self Movement, Precision Medicine, Workplaces, and Remote Electronic Monitoring. In each of these exemplars, the thesis highlights mechanisms of control and material strategies for transparency and resistance. In examining these case studies, I clarify the processes by which the scope of self-tracking technology broadens, and its intensity accumulates. The final chapter considers the emergence of a mutual praxis of critique and design that helps one (re)imagine of the power relations that are embedded into sociotechnical systems of self-tracking by way of a meta-discourse on human datafication, control, and agency.
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ItemCultural China on the Small Screen: The Construction of a New Nationalism( 2022)This thesis presents a study of China’s Science and Education channel, CCTV-10, between 2001 and 2013, arguing that it played a vital role in (re)constructing Chinese cultural nationalism in response to external globalising forces and internal commercialising trends. By exploring the complexities of CCTV-10 programmes’ form and content in the context of its historical development and policy environment, I examine this channel’s place in the national imaginary of a new, twenty-first century China and explore the cultural space of negotiations thus created between intellectuals, state media, and the viewing public. The main focus of our discussion is given to the emergent power of media intellectuals via CCTV-10, their vision of a cultural China, and their changing relationships with both the policy-making state and the general public. Through this, I aim to trace the institutionalisation of a new TV culture that developed, through initiatives taken by Chinese media intellectuals, into a distinctive brand of cultural nationalism under state supervision. My objective is to test the hypothesis that the case of CCTV-10 demonstrates the convergence of culture, economy, technology, and politics hewing out new possibilities for a multi-vocal public sphere. I argue that the channel’s nationwide popularity signified the (re)ascendant role of intellectuals as a key force in China’s post-socialist public culture. In terms of methodology, my work on public culture has grounding in intellectual history, media studies, and policy and censorship analyses, all of which I combine in this thesis. The chapters have been divided into three major parts with separate purposes: first to contextualise CCTV-10’s birth and growth, then to explore its transitional point, and finally to analyse its representative texts. I have intentionally given a large portion of the thesis over to contextualising and mapping in order to show the texts both in conjunction with and as a response to their contexts. Overall, I employ three concrete methods of analysis: rich contextualisation of the study of emergent discourses of culture and nation in contemporary China, policy studies under three different leaderships (Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping), and textual / formal analyses of television content. The significance of this study is twofold. On the one hand, it offers compelling evidence of highly diverse voices and heterogeneous directives at work in CCTV-10 programmes and thus challenges any simplistic assumption of the purely propagandistic effects of China’s official TV channels. On the other hand, it explores CCTV-10’s increasing populism in the light of Chinese intellectuals’ perennial quest to shape and guide public opinion, thus revealing historical links that problematise any superficial impression of the channel’s commercialisation and marketisation. In sum, I demonstrate that during the years covered by this thesis, a vibrant “shared space”, if not a public sphere in the strict Habermasian sense, was taking shape at the very heart of official media: CCTV, the mouthpiece of the Party.
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ItemImaging a Biocentric Australia: Environmentalism and Aboriginalism in the Art and Life of Clifton Pugh (1924-1990)( 2022)This thesis concerns the Australian modernist artist Clifton Pugh (1924-1990) and his emotional and intellectual engagement with the Australian environment, its Aboriginal inhabitants, and the way in which he expressed an environmental aesthetic and ethical awareness through art, activism, and an environmentally sustainable bush lifestyle. Renowned as a dramatic painter of primal landscapes beset by volatile elemental forces and predatory beasts, Pugh contributed greatly to national imagery during the 1950s and 1960s. He won the coveted Archibald Prize for portraiture three times and his work is represented in all major galleries and most regional and university collections in Australia. But in recent decades, Pugh has fallen from critical favour. The current art-historical appraisal of his oeuvre is outdated and limited to a narrow temporal period between 1959 and 1963. This thesis presents a study of Pugh for the twenty-first century, employing theories of environmental aesthetics, ethics, and Aboriginalism. It demonstrates how Pugh communicated environmental messages through art, examining for the first time Pugh’s use of Aboriginal motifs and techniques and the reasons why he represented Aboriginal people in his landscape painting and how this interest intersected with his environmental attitude and approach to conservation. It argues Pugh presents a biocentric vision of the Australian landscape to promote an environmental culture that values and respects Australian nature. Furthermore, his perception of Aboriginal art, culture, and stewardship form a significant part of this perspective, shaping his environmental attitude and visual orientation towards nature in art. This new interpretation of Pugh is not only relevant to Australia but also has global implications. It represents a local ideation of a broader shift in Western thought about the human-nature relationship that emerged during the 1960s.
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ItemBakhtinian Chronotopes in the Campus Novel; and a Short Story Collection: Gutsy Little Unit( 2022)This thesis contributes to Bakhtinian chronotope studies by identifying and examining the campus chronotope produced in campus novels. In the campus novel genre, campus environs are more than simply a setting in which to locate action: the university is a geographical and psychological site that occupies a central position within the text and acts as an influential character determinant. Given that campus spatiotemporalities underpin campus novels, Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the chronotope presents as an apposite analytical framework with which to study them. In the literary analysis component, I consider three distinct chronotopic forms – dominant, intervallic and motivic – to present chronotopic readings of three campus novels. Taking Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005) as an exemplar campus novel, I examine the narrative opportunities afforded by the spatiotemporal constraints of the novel’s dominant campus chronotope. This examination subsequently informs the argument that competing intervallic chronotopes of campus, crime fiction and Greek tragedy create a notable chronotopic hybridity in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992). The campus chronotope also supports reframing and extending the diegetic value of Bakhtin’s staircase chronotopic motif and his established interpretation of stairways as sites of threshold and encounter. I contend that Vladimir Nabokov amplifies the stairway to the level of a stage in his campus novel Pnin (1957) by exploiting its associated spatiotemporal elements of performance, display and spectacle. In the creative component, I position the campus chronotope as a generative writing device to present a collection of interlinked short stories and flash fiction titled Gutsy Little Unit. Threaded through many of the stories is the campus chronotope in dominant, intervallic or motivic form. The collection is primarily focalised through the character of Nessie Loewe, though several characters in her orbit are protagonists in their own dedicated stories. Nabokov’s Pnin strongly influences the configuration of this short story collection; I take inspiration from its lightly comical tone and interlinked story structure of impressionistic sketches of Timofey Pnin’s life in and around a college.
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ItemAutofiction and the Crisis of Reproduction: Textual Politics in the New Century( 2022)Abstract To understand the significance of the proliferation of autofictions in recent years, I present two seminal iterations of the form in the American context for analysis—Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Published within a year of each other, and both narrating the early 2010s, these two important works mark a crucial period within contemporary American literary production that, I argue, is marked by the widening awareness of crisis—in particular, its impact on the writing process and the future culture of literary reception. I argue that the intensely situated and self-reflexive mode of autofictions suggest that crisis strikes at the heart of the economic, ideological and temporal foundations of textual reproduction—it challenges not just our sense of the future as guaranteed, but the purpose and viability of artmaking in the shadow of these ever-widening challenges. To understand how new autofictions encounter this fraught literary future, I have invented the rubric of the ‘Telos of the Text’, a way of thinking that reframes crisis in the world as crisis of textual reproduction. Autofictions don’t solve the problem of the Telos of the Text (the problem of textual reproduction in times of crisis) —but remediate the aporia of crisis towards new formulations of the reader–writer relation. Problems such as climate change and income inequality come to be redescribed as writerly and readerly problems. In 10:04 and The Argonauts the reader comes to represent a damaged futurity that is accessible by virtue of the pressure exerted by crisis on time itself. This thesis incorporates a creative component which explores the new ‘timeliness’ of crisis through not only autofictional forms, but other kinds of experimental, and traditional literary modes. I argue in the critical that the timeliness of autofiction is a textual singularity enabled by crisis—more specifically, the flux of past, present and future that thinking and writing with crisis entails. In the creative component, I demonstrate that this is a timeliness which will continue to haunt the reader–writer relation, not only in autofiction, but contemporary fictions more broadly.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGuests, Hosts, Ghosts: Art Residencies and Cross-Cultural Exchange( 2022)This thesis investigates art residencies as sites of hospitality. It analyses two cross-cultural residency projects I developed: a residency organised on standard lines, involving art travel, and a hybrid residency, involving virtual and in-person elements. My discussions reflect on the conditions of art residencies before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, explaining the distinction between visitation and invitation, the ethics of working in a place that is not 'your own home,' and the potential of the gift exchange to challenge fixed binary roles such as host/guest, insider/outsider, giver/receiver. The thesis proposes a new understanding of the changing relationships between art residencies and artists through the curatorial implications of the act of showing and of hospitality.
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ItemThe thought of the review: Blanchot, Derrida, Kofman and 'Critique'( 2022)This thesis explores the importance of the review form in twentieth-century French thought. Although it is generally thought of as a minor form of intellectual activity, review writing was ubiquitous in this period and operated as an important scene for the production and dissemination of ideas. Focussing on the work of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Sarah Kofman, and the revue Critique, I argue that the practice of review writing had a decisive influence on the development of the broader styles of reading, writing and engagement that define this philosophical moment. I examine how Blanchot, in his literary-philosophical reviews of the early-mid 1940s, challenged the normative positioning of the critic, seeking out an internal relation to the movement of thought itself and of writing to writing. Blanchot’s early reviews were taken up by Georges Bataille and Pierre Prevost as a foundational model for their revue Critique. Critique in turn built an institutional legacy that influenced an entire generation of philosopher-critics. Both Derrida and Kofman published reviews in Critique early on in their careers and across the thesis I analyse some of their early reviews, tracing the diffusion and development of the Blanchotian model. I establish methodological and stylistic ties between the reviews and Blanchot’s book collections including The Infinite Conversation (1969), Derrida’s Glas (1974) and Kofman’s Explosion I & II (1992/3). In short, I argue that the review form inflects philosophical expression more broadly during this period such that it becomes intensely situated, radically plurivocal, and abyssally reflexive. What unites this critical lineage is a style of thought that is highly responsive to and therefore hyper-situated within its milieu, that puts multiple voices in close proximity and so makes philosophical expression plural, and that places the structure of the critical encounter itself in question and is thus marked by a profound sense of reflexivity.
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ItemMapping Dja Dja Wurrung Objects Through Global Museum Networks: Historiographies, inventories, and provenances( 2022)This archival and historical study explores the removal, exchange, and provenance data of cultural materials made by Dja Dja Wurrung people of central Victoria in southeast Australia, which are held within collecting institutions. As a result of colonisation, First Nations cultural material has been removed from Country and dispersed to collecting institutions globally through complex networks of exchange. Many items are poorly documented with records relating to who made them and where they were removed from often being incomplete, fragmented, or ambiguous. Decades of First Nations advocacy seeking repatriations, and, importantly, to ‘find what was thought to be lost through the process of colonisation’, has resulted in increasing numbers of projects seeking to inventory and provenance globally distributed collections. This dissertation presents the conceptual, methodological, and empirical findings of a scoping survey that involved inventorying Victorian First Nations cultural material and associated records held across 33 collecting institutions in Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and mainland Europe. A key outcome of this survey is the creation of a digital archive generated through the methodological experiment of assembling Dja Dja Wurrung cultural material, and mapping and contextualising relationships between information fragments within the project archive as a strategy for provenancing. The process of assembling and ordering provenance records relating to Victorian First Nations collections more broadly within the archive revealed factors that significantly hindered the identification of individual Dja Dja Wurrung objects as records were distributed, fragmentary, and colonially constituted. While provenance and museum records are typically considered authoritative, this dissertation contributes to discourse which challenges this narrative and re-imagines the notion of provenance as one that is fundamentally ‘contextual’. It reveals the complexities and ambiguities inherent in provenance data by exploring the collection biographies of four Dja Dja Wurrung related items that revealed the multi-layered nature of provenance, and the questions generated in the process of interrogating the veracity of archival confidence in relation to provenance. A significant contribution of this dissertation is the collation of challenges specific to provenancing Dja Dja Wurrung material, which are the result of regionally specific ways in which First Nations cultural materials was collected in Victoria. It further aims to confront the colonial conundrum of First Nations cultural property identified (or provenanced) as regionally generic, such as being from “Victoria” or “southeast Australia”, rather than First Nations specific attributions, such as Dja Dja Wurrung. Drawing on research observations together with those of Dja Dja Wurrung cultural specialists given during interviews, the dissertation emphasises the need for rigor in establishing the provenance of items in museum collections and, in this, the need to ensure these recognise and give effect to First Nation’s needs for culturally safe provenancing practices.
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ItemDo university students learn better from paper or screen? A study of delivery mode and first language when reading for comprehension( 2022)This thesis investigates whether university students learn better from paper or screen and whether reading in a first language (L1) or second language (L2) makes any difference to these learning levels. A mixed-methods experiment examined learning measures, cognitive-load levels and reading experience for 229 university students (116 English L1 and 113 Chinese L1) during immersive reading. Although participants reported a strong preference for paper when reading to learn, no evidence was found to indicate any difference existed between paper and screen, either in the combined sample or within individual L1 groups on the core learning variables. This was despite several methodological factors that should have afforded a slight paper benefit, especially within the English-L1 group. It is possible, therefore, that the finding of no difference may have obscured a slight screen benefit. Although the delivery modes delivered similar learning levels, participants also demonstrated more positive mindsets toward their assigned delivery mode – and the study more generally – when reading on paper compared to screen. This was likely the manifestation of participants’ bias toward paper when reading to learn. Meanwhile, the English-L1 and Chinese-L1 readers demonstrated markedly different results, with the Chinese-L1 readers achieving lower learning levels and reporting higher cognitive load. This gap endured even when age, English silent reading fluency, and time at university were accounted for. As such, it was unsurprising that the English-L1 readers enjoyed a better reading experience than the Chinese-L1 readers, which likely represented both the cause and the effect of the disparity in learning and cognitive load. These findings provide valuable insights for university staff and policy makers. Student equity can be enhanced through accessibility measures, such as implementing plain language in academic settings. The results also suggest that English-L2 students require additional support to employ effective global comprehension strategies and identify academic writing conventions used in English-based texts. Furthermore, opportunities exist for educational institutions to support students in both harnessing the benefits of screen-based reading and accepting digital devices as efficient delivery modes when reading to learn.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableRococo Film Aesthetics( 2021)This thesis conceives of film design as an art of surface that is rococo in nature. I analyse the films of Sofia Coppola as decorative rococo spaces that present emotional topographies. I then further argue that the surface of film design sparks the imagination, and its moving forms activate perceptual journeys.