School of Culture and Communication - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 3 of 3
-
ItemLarrikins, Listeners and Lifeline: inside Australian comedy chatcast The Little Dum Dum Club( 2022)Australian comedy chatcast The Little Dum Dum Club (2010 – present) is a loosely structured weekly podcast hosted by two stand-up comedians and good mates Tommy Dassalo and Karl Chandler. Each episode usually features one to three guests, often also stand-up comedians, who casually chat with Chandler and Dassalo and joke about their lives and the world around them. In this thesis I establish how hosts, guests and listeners of comedy chatcasts co-create their performance conventions by collaboratively and often unwittingly combining a range of social norms, stand-up comedy techniques and conversational skills. Understanding how these conventions are created and shared shows how comedy chatcasts influence host and listener behaviour in podcast-related spaces and in their broader lives. As I demonstrate, comedy chatcasts have influence even when the intention of the hosts and guests is only to be funny. The comedians in The Little Dum Dum Club are always looking for the joke, and the humour is often insult-based and puerile. These are contemporary larrikin performances, involving taking the piss out of one another, themselves and authority in an egalitarian way, a shared self-deprecation that also encompasses a sense of mateship. Rather than uncritically reiterating these dominant conventions of white Australian masculinity, however, the comedic performances in the podcast both represent and critique them. The performance conventions of comedy chatcasts create a “safe space” in which comedians can humorously explore ideas and respond to changing cultural norms in a way that does not radically reshape them but does suggest opportunities for intervention and evolution. The impact of this is clear, for instance, in the meaningful but humorous discussions of suicidality on the podcast and how joking about lived experience reframes flippant suicide jokes to lessen shame and promote help-seeking behaviour among listeners and comedians. Listeners likewise have a set of conventions which enable them to perform their fandom of the comedy chatcast. Building on podcast scholarship about intimacy and parasocial relationships, I show how listeners attempt to replicate the mateship form of friendship performed on the podcast using its jokingly abusive comedy style. For listeners of The Little Dum Dum Club, successfully performing their listenership requires navigating a series of at times conflicting conventions which are often at odds with broader norms of appropriateness and do not necessarily find a willing audience. Podcasts have niche global audiences and conventions need to be interpreted and performed to receptive audiences in order to be successful. The Little Dum Dum Club is unique in its content, but not in its construction. This thesis shows how comedy chatcasts as new media enable analysis of the shifts in and discussions of our cultural norms that happen in non-radical, flexible and playful ways. Through such analysis, we can see how comedy chatcasts can be influential in minor and major ways for those involved.
-
ItemEveryday Traces: Diasporic Hauntings and the Affectivity of Historical Trauma Among Cambodian-Australian Women( 2020)This thesis explores how traces of the Cambodian genocide affectively haunts Cambodian-Australian women. I draw upon postcolonial theory, affect theory and feminist studies, to analyse the ways in which Cambodian-Australian women mediate memories and experiences in relation to broader cultural, social and historical structures. I contend that intergenerational trauma, gendered norms, and the politics of racism and belonging shape women’s connections to their Cambodian heritage and Cambodian identities in diverse and significant ways. My methodology, which includes qualitative in-depth interviews with Cambodian-Australian women is informed by a feminist approach that foregrounds women’s lived experiences. Yet, this thesis is not only about haunted diasporic subjects; it is also written from the perspective of a haunted diasporic subject. Given my positionality as an ‘insider’ researcher, I use a reflexive, autoethnographic approach, to writing, in order to challenge conventional modes of storytelling in academia and to interrogate what counts as ‘evidence’ in social science research. To this end, I situate my autoethnographic pieces alongside my participants’ narratives in an attempt to disrupt the subject-researcher distinction. My thesis adopts Grace Cho’s (2008) creative and reflexive approach and Avery Gordon’s (2008) method of ‘linking imagination and critique’, to not only explore the hauntings legacies of the Cambodian genocide, but to perform the very thing that my research tries to capture: ‘affective hauntings’. Using Avery Gordon’s (2008) theory of ‘haunting’ as an overarching framework, I argue that for many of my participants, all of whom were raised in Australia by one or both parents who survived the Cambodian genocide, the collective traumas of Cambodia’s devastating history have affected and continue to affect their lives, in subtle and not so subtle ways. Intergenerational hauntings, while sometimes difficult to locate, can provoke affective states that are embodied, and reflect emotions such as confusion, guilt, unease, melancholy, sadness, sorrow, pain, pride, and gratitude. These affective states are relational, contextually driven, cultural, discursive and continually negotiated. Certainly, embodied hauntings speak to histories of grief and loss, and yet from this loss, something else, something beyond psychopathology emerges. Drawing on feminist theories that highlight the generative possibilities of affect (Dragojlovic and Broom 2018; Ahmed 2010), I explore how intergenerational hauntings are sites of possibility that can open up new ways of thinking about identity and agency. As illustrated by my participants’ narratives, hauntings can be expressed by desires to actively engage with the past, recover histories, and ‘return’ to Cambodia.
-
ItemA Gothic vision: the architectural patronage of Bishop James Goold in colonial Victoria( 2020)During his almost 40 years long episcopacy, James Alipius Goold (1812-1886), the first Roman Catholic bishop of Melbourne, laid strong foundations for the Catholic church in Victoria. The diocese of Melbourne counted only two churches and two chapels when he arrived in 1848, but, during his lifetime, clergymen claimed he laid as many foundations stones as Saint Patrick himself. After ten years spent as a missionary in New South Wales, Goold dedicated himself to the diocese of Melbourne. He established a firm administration, and was involved in several aspects of church building. He selected prominent locations and provided parish priests with suitable designs, he decided how to allocate Government funds and visited the building site whenever possible. His architectural patronage exemplifies the evolution of Gothic taste in Victoria. While earlier commissions encompassed Gothick churches, in the wake of the gold rush Goold had the resources to commission archaeologically correct Gothic Revival churches from the English architects Joseph and Charles Hansom. Over the years Goold developed a network including leading manufacturers in Europe and Australia to provide glass, furnishings and metalwork of the finest quality for the Gothic churches he was building. He gifted items to the parishes to dignify also the humble temporary buildings used for Sunday mass. In 1858, the English Catholic-convert architect William Wardell relocated to Melbourne. He had worked on about 30 church commissions in England, almost all of them in the Gothic Revival style faithful to AWN Pugin’s principles. Wardell was the man Goold needed to pursue his Gothic vision in Victoria. In the following decade, the bishop commissioned him to provide plans for at least a dozen parish churches ranging in size and refinement for city parishes and rural districts alike. His ambitious patronage culminated with the realisation of St Patrick’s Cathedral to Wardell’s grand design, a building rooted in French and English mediaeval tradition matching the size of European cathedrals. Bishop Goold played a remarkable role in shaping the built environment of the colony. His championing of the Gothic Revival style ascribes his name among the group of patrons who translated European culture to colonial Australia.