School of Culture and Communication - Theses

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    How to do things with sadness : from ontology to ethics in Derrida
    Pont, Antonia Ellen. (University of Melbourne, 2010)
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    The mediatization of Malcolm X
    Petropoulos, Nash ( 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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    Hollywood Holidays: case studies of global film tourism sites and their ideological impacts
    Blackwood, Gemma ( 2011)
    This thesis presents a study of film tourism through considering the emergence of the film tourist and of film tourist sites in the mid twentieth century in California. The thesis traces the development of the phenomenon globally over the century and into the new millennium. This area is now a vibrant field of research in tourism studies and my own focus for the thesis is on the concept of the film tourist gaze as it is enunciated in the work of John Urry and others. This study explores the rise of film tourism and its impacts, through a cinema-culture conduit: both studio-created tourism and locations-based travel. I investigate the real impacts of film spectatorship upon local ecologies, and national branding campaigns on national cinemas. I argue that film tourism sites, through acts of “real-life” visitation after a screening experience, enhance the ideological messages contained in originating film texts through the tourist’s repetition of the film’s core narrative and themes at film sites. The practice of film tourism materialises the ideological fantasies contained within the cinema form, yielding interesting insights into the motivations of the film tourist. In each chapter, both the narrative of the individual film(s) and the tourist space itself are interrogated for their prevailing ideologies. The capitalist modes of consumption and production and the fetishisation of loss that the locations invoke, are revealed. From an analysis of five case studies – including three location-based case studies and two studio-based – I map out a constellation of cinematic cultural sites that are crucial to understanding the development of the contemporary film tourist gaze. I consider how film tourism has the power to convey negative stereotypes and damaging images about place/race onto locations that are destinations in the second last chapter and in the last chapter, I examine how national cinemas may become susceptible to tourism sector policy shifts as the economic benefits of film tourism become globally recognised. I show how this has the potential to impact upon the types of films and narratives that are selected and utilised by national cinemas for film tourism campaigns.
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    Foreign correspondents and fixers: an investigation of teamwork in international television newsgathering
    MURRELL, COLLEEN ( 2011)
    This thesis considers the relationship between television foreign correspondents and their locally-hired 'fixers' in order to ascertain the centrality and significance of this relationship in facilitating international news production. The design of this research project, with its emphasis on news production practice, was guided by scholars in the sociology of news tradition, such as Jeremy Tunstall, Michael Schudson, Stephen Reese, Pamela Shoemaker and Simon Cottle. The main research question asks to what extent, and how, is the relationship between the correspondent and the fixer important to newsgathering? Drawing on the theories of Pierre Bourdieu concerning the journalistic field and the acquisition of cultural capital, this research demonstrates how fixers possess vital stores of capital which foreign correspondents borrow in order to be successful in the field. This thesis explores in depth how the players work in tandem to overcome the difficulties posed by multi-skilling, parachuting, instant live reporting, and the 24-hour news cycle. Current newsgathering practice in Iraq is investigated as a case study, which reveals the difficulties of reporting from this dateline and reflects on how the level of danger has changed the nature of the correspondent-fixer relationship. Within this relationship, where a correspondent has the ultimate power to hire and fire, a fixer nonetheless brings significant influence to bear on story generation and story coverage. But does this influence bring into the Western news agenda stories that genuinely reflect localised, indigenous viewpoints? Or, in this globalised world, are fixers simply 'People Like Us' (PLU), who have absorbed Western news values and will reinforce them through the stories that they propose? In other words, are correspondents likely to gain an insight into localised communities and their problems that they might not otherwise have understood, or will they have their own views and presumptions reflected back at them? This thesis examines what the use of fixers reveals about the political economy of news and the changing context of international news production. It asks whether the growing importance of fixers in newsgathering reflects a move by media companies to eventually outsource international newsgathering to local employees. This thesis employs a qualitative methodological approach involving semi-structured interviews with foreign correspondents and fixers to explore their modus operandi and to investigate the building of overseas news teams.
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    Positive images: gay men and HIV/AIDS in the culture of 'post-crisis' (c.1996-)
    Kagan, Dion ( 2011)
    Since HIV/AIDS entered public consciousness as `GRID' (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) in 1981, an epidemic of media representations have shaped the social processes and semantics underlying all aspects of the pandemic, including conceptions of risk, identity and sexuality. Spectacularized images of gay male bodies, lifestyles and identities dominated early imaginings of the disease in the global north, constructing HIV/AIDS as constitutive of, or as an effect of, male homosexuality itself. In the intervening thirty years there have been multiple and significant transformations in the knowledge, management, and demographics of the pandemic. `Epidemic' has become `global pandemic', and the actual and perceived AIDS crisis zones have shifted from the communities of gay men, IV drug users and other minorities in the west to large parts of the `developing world'. For those of us living in parts of the world with the privilege of access to treatment, the advent of antiretroviral therapies (c.1996) and other HIV management strategies have heralded significant changes to the cultural profile of the disease, shifting its status from almost definitely terminal `AIDS' to chronic manageable `HIV'. This thesis analyzes the changing cultural politics of popular representations of gay men and HIV/AIDS in this changed cultural landscape of `post-crisis'. The term `post crisis' emerged in the fields of HIV/AIDS social research and health promotion where it has been used as a general description of the altered conditions of HIV/AIDS among western gay men. In this thesis, I develop this term as part of a descriptive, periodizing and theoretical framework with which to historicize the transformed landscape of representations of gay men and HIV/AIDS that has emerged since the advent of antiretrovirals, and to highlight specific changing logics of representation. Using a range of Anglo-American texts as case studies, I argue that the discourses of this latter historical moment of post-crisis are underwritten by a 'bi-polar' cultural logic, in which both male homosexuality and HIV vacillate between the extraordinary and the mundane. This is a historically conditioned dialectic that has evolved from the legacy of the phobic discourses of AIDS crisis (`crisis discourse') alongside transformations in the cultural profile of HIV. Each chapter examines this dialectic in case studies selected to illustrate a range of its manifestations and implications. The first of these is the context of expanded images of gay men in American popular culture of `the Gay 90s' - specifically the Hollywood gay man/straight woman buddy comedy - where a disavowal of crisis discourse is at work in the production of the `New Gay Man'. In this instance, a domesticated gayness is produced through a ritual disavowal and spectacularized objectification of repositories of AIDS signification_ I then examine Queer as Folk, which dramatizes this unresolvable post-crisis tension between spectacularized otherness and normativity together within the body of the PLWHA. A case of Australian media sex panic around barebacking and reckless infection is then used to identify an emphatic, albeit recalibrated revivification of crisis discourse and a series of paradoxes produced in the tension generated by the dialectic of crisis/post-crisis. Finally, I consider the ambivalent production of `AIDS heritage' as a post-crisis memory practice that is also conditioned by this historically conditioned dialectic. These case studies are organized roughly chronologically as a means of historicizing this trajectory `out of' the spectacular moment of `crisis' toward a quotidian, normative `post'. However, all of these case studies illustrate an ambivalent and unresolved reckoning with the immediate legacy of AIDS crisis discourses, which may either be unsuccessfully disavowed or spectacularly revivified, and which vie for representational supremacy with images of gay men and HIV that are normal, normative, quotidian, mundane or invisible.
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    The art school and the university: research, knowledge, and creative practices
    Butt, Daniel James ( 2011)
    This thesis tracks changes in ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’ emerging from the incorporation of the art school into the university through the end of the 20th century. Identifying the need for historicised accounts of these contemporary institutions, the thesis synthesises the historical transformation of i) the modern university; ii) the art academy; and iii) the genre of the Ph.D. thesis that holds disciplinary knowledge in the arts and sciences through the 19th and 20th centuries. A key finding of this investigation is that these institutional forms have been revised according to different philosophical bases at different times, which is particularly evident in the substitution of science and natural philosophy for theology as the secular organising principle for the modern university. This displacement, which is also a repetition of its Christian heritage, begins in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, finally dominating higher research study by the 20th century. The investigation also finds that while studio art education has aspired to the status of liberal knowledge since at least the 15th century, its role as a university discipline remains conflicted, lacking a widely-held shared rationale for its modes of research that are nevertheless spreading rapidly through the provision of practice-based doctorates. The thesis argues that as with other new disciplines to the university, it will be through elaboration of a discipline-specific discourse drawn from the field itself that sustains its institutional acceptance, rather than the simple borrowing of other research definitions from other knowledge paradigms. Based on these findings, the final chapters of the thesis use scholarship in the history and philosophy of science to critique the Protestant-dominated moral economies embedded in scientific research paradigms that influence academic justifications for practice based research, with attention to postcolonial and feminist analyses of constitutive subjectivities underpinning these paradigms. The thesis then uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler on archives of knowledge to elaborate a process of performative individuation in relation to material ‘bodies of knowledge’, arguing that such a process differs from idealist scientific relationships to constative knowledge, and that this offers a more appropriate paradigm for considering the contributions to knowledge of the visual arts. Drawing upon Derrida’s account of the ‘university without condition’ (2002) and Spivak’s account of humanities learning, the thesis argues that the critical culture of ‘singularisation’ customary to the visual arts can productively address current transformations in the mission and operations of the university. A short postscript considers the implications of this argument for academic policies governing practice-led doctoral qualifications.
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    Unputdownable: how the agencies of compelling story assembly can be modelled using formalisable methods from Knowledge Representation, and in a fictional tale about seduction
    Cardier, Beth ( 2012)
    As a story unfolds, its structure can drive a reader to want to know more, in a manner that writers sometimes refer to as unputdownable. I model this behaviour so that it can be applied in two fields: creative writing and Knowledge Representation. Two forms of answer to my thesis question therefore emerged – a formalisable diagrammatic method, and an excerpt from a fictional novel, The Snakepig Dialect. The opening section of my thesis accounts for the theoretical exploration. This framework is designed to support a specific target product: a knowledge base capable of assembling fragments of information into causally coherent ‘stories.’ This assembly would be achieved through the identification of causal agents that connect the fragments, and a causal impetus that would enable the projection of possible outcomes, even when there is no precedent for them. This integration is managed by two novel features of my Dynamic Story Model. First, in order to facilitate accurate interpretation, I consider that multiple contextual situations must be arranged into relationships, just as concepts are positioned in semantic networks. Second, the associative priorities of these multiple inferences are managed by a principle that I term governance, in which the structures of some networks are able to modify and connect others. In order to extend current devices in Knowledge Representation so that these features can be represented, I draw on my own creative writing practice, as well as existing theories in Narratology, Discourse Processes, Causal Philosophy and Conceptual Change. This model of unputdownability is expressed differently in my fictional submission. The tale is set in a future Australia, in which China is the dominant culture, the weather seems to be developing intentional behaviours, and Asia's largest defence laboratory sometimes selects unusual talents to work in its invention shop. One apprentice in this institute, Lilah, falls in love with someone who seems unattainable. Instead of solving the assigned problem, she develops a formula for seduction, testing it on her beloved before she is capable of controlling her strange gift. Lilah’s seduction technique is based on a principle of governance similar to that described by my theoretical model. She learns to how to seduce by offering only fragments of information about herself, drawing her beloved into her story by provoking wonder, which eventually bends her lover’s desires. Lilah’s tale also explores the challenge of modelling a new scientific theory, and she struggles with the same difficulty of articulating an elusive phenomenon that I have in this research (but iii! with more dramatic consequences for her failures). At the same time as featuring the core concern of my research question in the plot, I have also used my model to revive this novel. By establishing terms of agency and allowing them to evolve, each section of text came to build on the next, so the reader could wonder how they might resolve. In this way, I anchored my theoretical propositions about stories in fictional practice, and gained insight into the writing process, in order to revive my ailing novel.
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    Frontier justice in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Cormac McCarthy
    WOOD, DANIEL ( 2012)
    With narratives set on the American frontier and a focus on the disappearance of the frontier and its intergenerational legacy, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1841) and Cormac McCarthy’s series of Southwestern novels (1985-2005) share a genre and a set of common interests. Recently, however, critics of the two series have noted a closer kinship between them, a kinship that emerges as McCarthy recurrently alludes to Cooper’s work and its status as the foremost canonical work of frontier fiction in the American tradition. In this thesis, asking whether there might be more substance to that kinship, I suggest that Cooper and McCarthy share similar concerns about the effect of the frontier as a site of settlement on the jurisprudential principles of the American justice system as codified in the United States Constitution. With his Tales, I argue, Cooper articulated an ambivalent response to the nineteenth century popularisation of what I call the ethic of frontier justice — a mode of jurisprudence, emerging from the settlement of the frontier, which departs from that of the Constitution — while McCarthy’s Southwestern series identifies its ongoing popularity, despite the absence of the frontier, and points to Cooper’s Tales as having contributed to its survival.
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    Bruce Chatwin and the practice and politics of genre
    Heddle, J. A. ( 2012)
    Abstract withheld