School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemTravel, Emotions, and Race in Anthony Trollope’s Travelogues, Letters, and Fiction( 2023-06)This thesis examines the role of emotion in Anthony Trollope’s shifting opinions on race and colonialism in his famine writing, travel narratives, and fiction connected to his travels. For a nuanced understanding of his first-hand experiences of race, I tie affect theory to Mary Louise Pratt’s conceptualisation of the contact zone, investigating the complex power dynamic between Trollope and the racial other, Trollope and the colonists, and the role of corporeality and environment in shaping his feelings. In addition, my analysis contextualises Trollope’s negotiation of sympathetic feelings towards the colonised. To address the intricacy of his emotions, I examine Trollope’s rapid writing methods, which preserved his immediate emotions. As this work will demonstrate, Trollope was slow in processing emotions and thoughts, particularly those which challenged his prior beliefs. He was thus prompted to revise some of his views in later works, in particular—as I argue, drawing on the work of Helen Lucy Blythe—using fiction to revisit difficult encounters that had lingered in his imagination. Trollope’s emotional lability was connected to his hasty drafting of work (he wrote quickly as he travelled), which inhibited deep reflection. As I shall demonstrate in this thesis, Trollope’s position on race fluctuated as he travelled through different colonies, learning more about their distinct geographical features, racial conflict, and the politics of his hosts. Examining accounts of his time in Ireland, the West Indies, Australasia, and South Africa, this thesis will offer a new reading of Trollope’s travel writing, combining textual scholarship with emotions and affect theory.
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ItemUlysses as a Subject of Truth: Joycean Modernism and its Unnameable Object( 2023-06)This study investigates the relation of realism to modernism as established and transformed in Ulysses. The political upheavals such as the first world war forced upon modernists a recognition of the insufficiency of different modes of representation, above all those of the 19th century “realism”. Realism, in Theodor W. Adorno’s understanding, is already a consciousness of, and fascination with, a perceived loss of reality. This bears on the question of totality (a la Georg Lukacs on “epic” or Walter Benjamin on “the Storyteller”) as an impossible entity to realize in modernist novels. Incorporating the insufficiency of realism and the impossibility of totality in Ulysses, introducing “synthetic objectivity” in its narrative, shifting between endless ontic descriptions and a subsequent primacy of unrepresentable processes, “representing” the “situations” presented on the reality of unnamable objects with a myriad of parallaxes and so on, become the points of a prior event on the route to establishing the truth of Joycean modernism which I discuss through Alain Badiou’s ontology that binds “truth” to “being”.
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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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ItemReading Strange Matters: The Magic Word in Early Modern English Drama( 2023-06)Reading Strange Matters explains both the literal and proverbial ‘magic’ of stage acting during the English Renaissance. Inspired by numerous descriptions of an actor’s work as ‘charming’ as well as ‘bewitching’, it investigates the practice of acting as it is described in both antitheatricalist critiques and poetic defences. Using both the early modern science of emotions and the nature of sympathetic magic as frameworks, it produces a ‘physics’ of theatrical power as conceived at the time. Narrowing focus to an actual actor’s body on stage, the focus then moves through the classical rhetorical trivium of voice, gesture, and countenance, gradually mapping these terms of mimetic art onto the domains of magic and alchemy. Following key conceptual metaphors like ‘attention is a grip’, ‘art is a mirror’, and ‘knowledge is prey’, it identifies a violent epistemology that informs dominant assumptions about how human passions can be performed and influenced on the early modern stage. This thesis does not maintain a narrow chronological focus in the play texts it incorporates (e.g. ‘Jacobean’), preferring to track the broad applicability of the above conceptual trends across a range of play texts spanning the proliferation of London public theatres from the 1570s to the 1640s. Examples of linguistic metaphors that echo the conceptual metaphors listed above are cross-referenced against contemporary lexicons, glossaries, and hard-word books, as well as larger-scale samplings of word usages in context. This combination permits both a holistic and specific view of how linguistic metaphors play with conceptual metaphors, often in characteristically self-referential Renaissance English fashion. Important tools to this project include the Lexicons of Early Modern English (edited by Ian Lancashire) and the English-Corpora front-end query tool for the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP). The thesis concludes that this violent epistemology that presents knowledge and ‘secrets of nature’ as prey to be captured is well represented in poetry and stage drama. It calls for engagement with these literal bodies of knowledge using conceptual metaphor as an organising principle for collating textual evidence. Doing so offers abundant opportunities to practice a queer philology, defamiliarising ‘inevitable’ assumptions that form patterns in historical printed texts, and allowing scholars to better understand their strutting, fretting contexts.
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ItemGlobal crisis citizenship and deliberation: A comparative study of young generations' climate communication in Hong Kong and Melbourne( 2023-02)With the rise of the unprecedented global youth climate activism in 2019, the young generations are now at the forefront of global climate communication and politics. However, their spontaneous climate communication and engagement have rarely been approached from a transnational comparative perspective. This thesis aims to fill this gap by assessing how climate-concerned young individuals in Hong Kong and Melbourne perceive the global climate crisis, communicate about it, and engage with this epochal challenge. Relating to Mannheim’s (1952) theory of generations, this thesis argues that generation-specific crisis consciousness cultivated during these young individuals’ formative years enables them to form a “generation entelechy” and generational agency to respond to climate change. Focusing on these specific forms of locally based yet globalised young publics in two global cities, this thesis specifically investigates the way they construct their own civic identity and form public opinions in the times of the climate crisis. ‘Global crisis citizenship’ and ‘transplanetary dialogic deliberation’ are conceptualised accordingly to encapsulate these two processes and related practices. Moving beyond methodological nationalism, this thesis theorises these young generations’ crisis agency in a globalised context and offers a translocal perspective to compare their climate perceptions and communication experiences. This thesis draws on in-depth interviews with forty climate-concerned young adults in these two cities (n = 20 in each city, n = 40 in total). The research reveals that most participants perceive climate change as a complex crisis, construct their identity as global citizens in the context of the climate crisis, and unfold the sense of climate justice in various dimensions. Despite being on two different continents, respondents from the two cities share similar climate information sources and demonstrate comparable reasoning and justification skills. They also report similar influences on their practices of deliberation and subjective decision-making regarding climate awareness and actions. Overall, this thesis identifies more similarities than differences between young Hong Kongers’ and Melburnians’ climate perceptions and communication experiences. It provides in-depth insight into public climate communication in a globalised world during the climate crisis. The results also outline more fundamental structural elements that motivate globalised young publics facing the climate emergency to confront a common destiny as citizens of the planet. These connecting points emerge from their subjective experiences, making their awareness of global interconnectedness visible.
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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.
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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.
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ItemResisting Infinity: The Creative Practice of Aporetic Short Fiction( 2023-02)This thesis offers a framework for the written story as a creative-philosophical practice, in line with some of its earliest uses since 1904, when Franz Kafka began to write the stories of Betrachtung (Contemplation). Freeing the story from comparison with other forms, this project gives a positive reading of its most apparent feature: aporia, which goes under various names in short fiction theory, including difficulty, disorder, fragmentation, impressionism and subjectivity. Through concepts from Simone Weil and Sarah Kofman, and taking influential examples from the brief writings of Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and David Foster Wallace, this thesis aligns short fiction's creative practice with a long-standing and clear philosophical aim: shared, transformative enquiry. The first part of this thesis is a critical study; the second part, Remainders, is a suite of original brief writings strongly linked to the critical component. Through both parts, this practice-led thesis brings a new understanding of our written stories as active zones of preservation, connection and desire.
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ItemDiasporic Identities in Contemporary Vietnamese-Australian Literature( 2023-01)The thesis examined contemporary Vietnamese-Australian literature, investigating the ways Vietnamese-Australian writers – from boat people to generation 2 – understand their historical past and diasporic present, the directions their lives are taking, the pressures they face, and the way being diasporic has reshaped the way they represent both ‘homeland’ and ‘destination’.
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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.