School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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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.
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ItemWomen’s New Cinema: Political and Social Resistance in the Films of Female Directors from Turkey( 2023-03)For the first time in the history of cinema, Turkey has a generation of female directors who occupy their own space within the New Cinema Movement. They claim an authority of their own and create a distinct cinema. However, recent scholarship on the cinema of Turkey predominantly conceptualises contemporary cinema in relation to the patriarchal discourse of male auteurs and recognises its female directors in only a tokenistic manner. To date, there are almost no academic studies that defines the distinct production methods and stylistic approaches of female directors from Turkey holistically. Women’s New Cinema: Political and Social Resistance in the Films of Female Directors from Turkey is the first academic work recognising this historical moment – the flourish of a women’s cinema in Turkey which disrupts the dominant discourses and brings forward another view of post-millennial cinema. This study identifies the new production methods and stylistic approaches used by contemporary female directors from Turkey in relation to sociopolitical and cultural dynamics and conceptualises these features under the term “Women’s New Cinema.” It undertakes feminist textual exegesis of selected case studies of these directors’ work. This PhD thesis comprises a written exegesis (50% weighting) and a creative research component (also 50% weighting), the feature documentary film Senin Yillardir Gerceklestirmeyi Bekledigin Bir Dus Var/Dream Workers. The exegesis comprises of six case studies, with each case study the subject of one chapter. Each chapter mainly focuses on one unique feature of Women’s New Cinema and discusses it through the filmmaking practice of each director who was interviewed for the documentary film Dream Workers. The analysis of each director and her film/s provides insight into the broader discourse on feminist film theory enriched with the cinematic and feminist notions of accented scholars and scholars of colour. Choosing documentary as the methodology enabled the research to reflect the narratives and experiences of featured directors in their own voices. In producing the documentary, I also became one of the filmmakers who contributes to Women’s New Cinema. The exegesis also examines this reflexivity within this project to see if the production of the documentary film conforms to the production methods used by contemporary female filmmakers.
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ItemEpistemic Interculturalisms: Two Examples from Latin American Critical Thinking( 2023-02)This thesis examines two examples of interculturalism in which cultural politics are treated as knowledge politics. First the contextual intercultural philosophy of Fornet- Betancourt, and second the decolonial interculturalidad of Catherine Walsh. In these works, alterity is cast as epistemic difference tied to local/global histories of reality making. Yet the two examples are nested in different traditions of thinking about epistemic liberation in Latin America, generating different accounts of interculturalism. Examining these offers a sustained meditation on the relationship between transgressive knowledge politics, alterity, and context.
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ItemEdith Alsop, Artist( 2013)Edith Alsop (1871 – 1958) is now considered a minor twentieth century Australian artist, but during her some fifty years of artistic activity she was much more highly regarded. Her oeuvre covers sketches, drawings, watercolours, pastels, relief prints and book illustrations. She also produced posters, commercial art, friezes and some oil paintings. The University of Melbourne holds the largest public collection of Alsop’s works, located at The Ian Potter Museum of Art. My thesis will question why she has been forgotten. I will demonstrate an active and important artistic life and an almost textbook development as a professional artist. I find that Alsop suffered from the now well-documented fate of the invisibility of women artists from about 1940. From her oeuvre I pay particular attention to her prints as a small but distinct part of her artistic output. In the 1980s, women artists were being rediscovered. I believe that her lack of rediscovery results from her minor and erratic performance as a printmaker, her concentration on drawing and watercolour (as being ‘lesser than oils’) as her favoured mediums and her lack of visibility in public collections. This thesis is by far the most extensive research into this artist to date, and therefore illuminates her life and provides an important basis, or context, for the consideration of any of her art.
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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.