This project considers how digitally networked communication technologies are opening up interstitial spaces of belonging for people of refugee and migrant backgrounds after resettlement. The project draws on 35 interviews with 26 people from refugee and migrant backgrounds living in Melbourne, supplemented by photographs generated through a photo elicitation task. I contextualise the findings arising from this data by first considering the history of migrant inclusion in Australia, and the historical practice of migrant communication through letters. I argue that while digital platforms and global connections play an important role in supporting their social inclusion and sense of belonging, interaction in the physical, local world remains crucial nonetheless. I build this argument by drawing attention to the interstitiality of the three principal dyadic relationships underpinning the thesis: inclusion–exclusion, digital–physical, and local–global. I argue that digitally networked communication technologies are highly valued tools for connection which have greatest value in their capacity to include those who may otherwise be on the outer, to produce physical encounters through digital networks, and to localise the global regardless of physical location. But it must be acknowledged that this is only half the picture. By often prioritising the global and the digital, networked communications also have the potential to make people effectively absent from the local and the physical, and thereby lead to exclusion rather than inclusion. The notion of interstitial spaces of belonging opens up these opposing accounts to the reality of their interconnection, and in doing so allows a more authentic representation of the experiences of those people at the heart of this research. The significance of this research lies in foregrounding the nuances of situated lives and personal stories, and in advocating for a relational understanding of concepts such as social inclusion, social exclusion, and belonging; digital and physical sociality; and a local and global sense of place.

This thesis explores notions of (re-)enchantment in British “new nature writing”, as represented by writer Robert Macfarlane and poet Alice Oswald. It argues that their work describes a world of lively and potentially dangerous entanglements that disrupt the binary divisions (between subject/object, nature/culture, human/nonhuman) that framed old forms of “enchantment” and modern “disenchantment”. For both writers, re-enchantment registers our entanglement with our damaged world and, by occupying the terrain between enchantment and disenchantment, offers the groundwork for a future politics.

In much early-twentieth-century Anglophone writing, the imagining of China see-sawed between high Modernist Chinoiserie and the Yellow Peril. This thesis looks elsewhere for a different China, one which is found in the overlooked, non-canonical works of women travellers to and residents in China, published between 1895 and 1937. It examines the writings of both well-known and under-studied authors: Isabella Bird, Mary Gaunt, Emily Georgiana Kemp, Dorothea Hosie, and Florence Ayscough, in order to reconsider the complex relationship of gender, mobility, affect, and cosmopolitanism. Foregrounding elements of disorderly mobility and affective sociability, I explore how movement and transcultural encounters are gendered, embodied, and configured through relationships with Chinese people, places, objects, landscape, language and literature. In the process, I show how these very different women found themselves adopting creative approaches to the contested relations between self and other, home and abroad, root and route, tradition and modernity, configuring various forms of gendered cosmopolitanism. In addressing the ongoing re-examination of women writers’ contribution to the intellectual, literary, and cultural history, this thesis shows how a better, fuller understanding of women’s mobility demands new ways of appreciating the history of women’s lives as well as the history of West/East cultural exchanges.

This thesis argues that the concept of an intensive-image constitutes an important cinematic category hitherto neglected in Deleuze’s writings on the cinema in his two books, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. This thesis will explore the proposition that the concept of intensity, which comes from Deleuze’s differential philosophy and a branch of physics called thermodynamics, has the potential to change the way in which we think about his classification of the cinema as signifying two separate periods. I will examine the different ways in which the intensive-image runs through both of Deleuze’s cinematic periods, the classical period of the movement-image and the modern period of the time-image, thereby bringing them together and overcoming the separation that Deleuze’s film-philosophy creates. I will also explore the ways in which the intensive-image varies and differentiates itself from other images. The concept of intensity, which is so important for Deleuze’s philosophy and which he links directly to difference and variability, is strangely not accounted for in his cinema books where he presents a taxonomy of all the major images and signs central to the cinema. He writes at length about ‘intensity’ but not about the ‘intensive-image’. This is the reason why I plan to investigate the presence of the intensive-image across both of his film periods in order to see whether or not its representation necessitates a re-thinking of his argument and how central it is to a fuller understanding of the nature of the cinematic image. The meanings and properties of this image will be established through a close analysis of film texts, including a range of avant-garde, popular, ethnographic and poetic films stretching from the classical to the modern and the contemporary periods. Properties central to the intensive-image will include techniques that bring together, or create continuities, between the classical and the modern such as: processes of subtraction and de-visualisation; poetic displacements; narrative withdrawals; images of difference and becoming; free-indirect-discourse [discorso indiretto libero]; bodily perspectivism; and the empty space and dead time of an eventless form of cinema. Having explored the occurrence of the intensive-image across Deleuze’s two periods, in the final section, I will focus on new forms and expressions of this image in contemporary films.

This creative writing project explores questions of belonging and place in settler-colonial Australia, through an historical and writerly lens. It first explores the interrelationship between writing and colonisation, and the construction of settler identity in relation to the control of landscapes, narratives and representations of Aboriginal people. Through an interweaving of critical and autocritical writing, I draw upon personal experiences-in-place from a settler Australian perspective and use Deborah Bird Rose’s philosophy of ‘writing place’ in an attempt to methodologically unsettle colonising narratives and discourses. The thesis documents an emergent, experiential and immersive writing process, which is focused around the following questions: If the act of writing has been crucial to the construction of settler identity, and Aboriginal misrepresentation, can writing—and more specifically the practice of ‘writing place’— respond to place and our presence here through invasion, rather than our anxiety over the absence of belonging? How might we write as settlers in ways that do not distance us further from our identities as colonisers, from our history and from our potential to take responsibility for our legacies of colonisation? These are questions that drive the work, rather than questions that are answered by the work. Part One traces the development of this thesis through an unsettling of questions of settler belonging to a focus on writing place. It locates the thesis in two places: an Aboriginal community in northern Australia and Melbourne in southern Australia. Part Two is a series of meditations on place that document my explorations of ways to read and write place. I draw on both published texts, place as text, and texts encountered in place, in an effort to consider place as an important academic and literary source. Throughout the thesis, I keep a sense of irresolution to the fore, in an effort towards unsettling, rather than settling (or re-settling) the meaning of experience. Through writing place, I look to place as a text that can reveal our own colonising identities to us, to encourage us to move away from an attempt to ‘indigenise’ to belong but instead to come into relationship with ourselves and to understand how colonisation informs our relationships with place, history and Aboriginal people.

“Revolting Developments” presents the first extended, comparative analysis of Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Phoebe Gloeckner’s comics, prose and visual works through the critical framework of shame as an affective mode. These two innovative cartoonists, as well as being contemporaries and peers, have both produced formally and affectively disruptive representations of subjectivity over time, negotiating and subverting the gendered conventions of genre in order to instantiate a new, more productive relationship with their readers. The politics and poetics of looking and the gaze are refigured through Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s anti-confessional, testimonial representations of sexual violence and psychological parental abuse, their tentative embrace of abjection, and their resistance to prescriptive discourses of childhood. Kominsky-Crumb’s autobiographical comics refuse the categorisation of passive victimhood. Her representation of past trauma troubles the distinction between tragedy and comedy. Gloeckner’s representations of violence interrogate agency, complicity and the mutating power shifts that her young protagonists experience. Although these cartoonists approach shame differently (stylistically as well as conceptually), they both ultimately demonstrate a similar feminist politic. Orienting their texts through the history of the gendering of autobiographic strategies, the assignation of abjection, and the fragility and vulnerability of childhood, I argue that the critical lens of affect, specifically that of shame, provides a productive means of interrogating and analysing Gloeckner’s and Kominsky-Crumb’s negotiation of gendered interpellation and formal subversion of generic modes in order to represent serialised subjectivity. This thesis examines how the affective states of shame and abjection are registered and subverted in Gloeckner and Kominsky-Crumb’s work; following on from the work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Hillary Chute it asks how these writers represent shame and how they make this affect and experience productive for the female-gendered subject. Structured through shame’s identity-constituting delineation of subjectivity, heightened sense of embodiment, and identificatory relationality, this thesis analyses Kominsky-Crumb and Gloeckner’s negotiation of autobiographic strategies, subversion of gendered and cultural abjection, and critique of the discursive construction of girlhood. Their instantiation of an alternative relational identification is limited to a racially bounded image of girls, as Gloeckner, and to a lesser extent Kominsky-Crumb, instrumentalise a covetous and objectifying American Africanism in order to exploit the association of white fragility and feminine value.

This thesis examines the conceptualisations, uses, and politics of the lesbian secondary gender “tomboy” within lesbian communities in China (PRC), Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the late 2010s. The term tomboy has been widely used by queer women in these communities to describe masculine lesbian expressions, fashion, and/or gender role for over four decades. Screen representations of tomboy originating from within the Chinese-speaking world and from neighbouring Asian regions were particularly popular among these women during the late 2000s and early 2010s. And yet, since the 1990s and increasingly today, a growing section of these communities has been calling for a collective rejection of tomboy, claiming that it reinforces conservative patriarchal and heteronormative values and is therefore anti-feminist. This thesis draws on life stories from those caught between the once-popular use of tomboy and their newfound anti-tomboy feminist sensibilities. It explores the stories of the many women who decided to abandon their tomboy identity in search of their real gender, women who turn to American queer media in hopes of finding true feminist lesbian representations, those who struggle with whether to identify as tomboy or not, and those who in the process of self-searching no longer see themselves as lesbians or women at all. It analyses how contemporary debates about the tomboy in turn shape the ways in which these individuals think about gender, sexual identity, the self, geographies, and cultures. This thesis also examines the contributions that transnational queer screen representations make to popular conceptualisations of the tomboy and these related ideas. It combines textual analysis of relevant screen texts circulating within the communities in question with in-depth empirical interview data revealing participants’ interpretations of these screen texts. This thesis thus offers a critical engagement with the media materials that contribute to the cultural production of the tomboy identity, and more urgently, it is also a critical engagement with the intimate, conceptual, and affective worlds of those who live out this identity.

This thesis examines Indigenous Futurism as an activist practice. Indigenous Futurism is an emerging international mode of Indigenous creative production. Recently, it has become an increasingly used form of artistic expression and tool for political organising in Australia. Indigenous Futurism uses future time to produce visions of Indigenous survivance and to subvert colonial narratives of history and politics. It can transform our thinking in relation to challenges we face in the present as Indigenous people. In the last decade, a number of texts have emerged in Australia by Indigenous people which imagine political futures. This thesis explores three works made in 2013 and 2014, including Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book (2013), Ellen Van Neerven’s short story Water (2014), and Nicole Watson’s alternative feminist judgment In the Matter of Djappari re Tukiar 2035 (2014). Additionally, it engages with one Canadian virtual reality work by Danis Goulet, The Hunt (2017). The original contribution of this thesis is to examine Indigenous Futurist works as examples of what Poka Laenui describes as decolonial ‘dreaming’ (2000). It is also the contribution of this thesis to assert that the works belong to a broader gathering of Indigenous Futurist theory and creativity in an international context. In the Australian context, prior work on the texts studied in this thesis has categorised them based on western genre categories and thematics. Studies from literary theory have not engaged meaningfully with the analytical and philosophical frameworks provided by Indigenous Futurist thought. In response, this dissertation undertakes a critique of how literary theory has related to Indigenous literatures demonstrates how the texts implement the narrative strategies and political principles of Indigenous Futurism. 3 This thesis engages with these four contemporary Indigenous texts about the near future as activist texts. It extends on the prior work of Indigenous Futurist scholars and practitioners globally to conduct an exploration of Indigenous Futurism as both critical political tool and a distinct artistic movement which is growing in Australia. The thesis finds that Indigenous Futurism is a political form of writing and creative expression which complicates western understandings of genre. It demonstrates that Indigenous Futurist texts present new ways of thinking about justice, war, queerness, racism, climate trauma, and the role of plants and non-human actors in decolonial projects and cultural revitalisation. The analysis of the works studied in this thesis reveals a deep engagement with the dual narratives of the progressive white nation state and the myth of linear progress. This thesis argues that the texts are methods for critical engagement in themselves. It uses key frameworks from Indigenous literary theory, such as Chadwick Allen’s ‘Trans-Indigenous’ and the emerging methodology of storywork to present an analysis of the texts which breaks away from the normative habits of western literary theory, and to claim them as Indigenous Futurist texts that exist in a growing international critical movement.

This thesis focuses on the representation of African women in African female filmmakers' films. It compares Western representations of the African female victim to representations produced by African female directors. It traces shifts between the cinematic representation of women and feminist issues. Unlike earlier films of the 1970s, which focussed on structural and cultural barriers facing women, today, neoliberal policies and global feminism see African women's issues being represented in more individualistic terms. Global feminism focuses on addressing and explaining "the challenges and choices globalization presents for women" and deals with issues such as women's reproductive and sexual health, well-being, education on the global scale, with an emphasis on human rights (Tong &Botts, 2018, p.134). The body, and issues of rape and domestic violence have come to dominate feminist agendas globally, and this inevitably affects feminist cinema in Africa. The thesis argues that when these issues are portrayed in graphic terms, they are detached from historical and socio-economic structures. This runs the risk of perpetuating Western feminism's victim myth which ignores the complexities of African women's daily lives.

The theme of cultural identity is topical in the academy and society at large but it is especially significant for the Korean diaspora in Japan. This thesis investigates the means by which Japan-based second-generation Korean novelists Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong characterize 'zainichi Korean identity' in six semi-autobiographical novels written in Japanese between 1957 and 1972. I argue that a close reading of The Death of the Crow (1957) and The Extraordinary Ghost Story of Mandogi (1971) by Kim Sok Pom, The Cloth Fuller (1971) and For Kayako (1970) by Lee Hoe Sung1, and Frozen Mouth (1966) and Delusions (1971) by Kim Ha Gyong allows for an in-depth understanding of the experiences of Koreans born in Japan before 1945 and the effects of racial oppression on minority identity formation. Specifically, I evaluate and compare the methods by which ethnicity and images of the self are articulated by these three writers in their creative fiction. The thesis argues that, despite the diversity of the views the three writers off er on ethnicity and cultural identity, a theme which they all share is how to overcome the problem of identity fragmentation - the problem of negotiating incongruous hybrid­ Japanese/Korean identities. Ambivalent experiences of belonging or dislocation, vis-a-vis both Japan and Korea proper, surface as a continual source of concern for second-generation zainichi Korean writers and their protagonists. How hybridity and difference are articulated as a lived experience by Kim Sok Pom, Lee Hoe Sung and Kim Ha Gyong is at the heart of this thesis. Their protagonists are Japanese-appearing Korean men, who move between the two worlds of Japanese and (zainichi) Korean culture, and search for a unified identity, or at least contemplate what such an identity might be. In effect, they attempt to 'close the distance' between competing and conflicting images of the self while at the same time pointing to a new politics of identity and sense of belonging, where diversity no longer suggests distance but the possibilities inherent in a truly inclusive society.

The critical component of this thesis explores the value of poetry as a therapeutic tool in recovery from severe mood episodes and associated suicide attempts in individuals diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Through literary analysis of Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium and Jeanann Verlee’s Said the Manic to the Muse, I suggest that poetry allows a therapeutic space for dynamic reclamation of subjective narrative experiences of bipolar disorder from the medical discourse. Poetic devices such as personification and juxtaposition support the decentralisation of narrative in the subjective dialectic, thus creating scope for the productive tolerance of polarities, fragmentation and disorder. In doing so, poetry can facilitate emotional healing whilst eschewing redemptive narrative arcs. This provides valuable alternate readings and renderings of ‘recovery’ as part of an ongoing management of chronic mental illness which prioritises the experiential perspective, and thereby posits poetic process as a dynamic therapeutic tool in bipolar and attempted suicide contexts. The creative component of this thesis is a collection of poetry exploring my own recovery.

Over the past decade, governments and community organisations have increasingly employed urban media infrastructure, such as large screen and projection technology, to achieve digital placemaking ambitions and encourage public participation. Despite their growing popularity as part of urban renewal projects, questions remain about the efficacy of using urban media infrastructure to achieve placemaking and public engagement objectives. Some scholars are concerned with the displacing and alienating effect of screen technology in urban contexts, while others highlight the new participatory potential of this media. By adopting an ‘infrastructural’ lens, I examine the affordances and limitations of urban media infrastructure and argue for the specific conditions under which this infrastructure can make a positive contribution to the experience of public space. To support my argument, I present two case studies that describe the role of urban media infrastructure in suburban public spaces in Melbourne, Victoria. I have developed these case studies through a combination of policy analysis, fieldwork including observation and interviews, and visual analysis. These case studies demonstrate that the capacity for urban media infrastructure to contribute to digital placemaking objectives is contingent upon a range of other factors including the spatial setting, media literacy of citizens and community trust. Importantly, I argue that organisational governance and processes play an underrated role in the ability for organisations to realise the full potential of urban media infrastructure. A comparison of the two case studies demonstrates the importance of a strong vision, programming strategy and organisational flexibility in ensuring urban media infrastructure can support digital placemaking objectives and enable a new praxis of public participation.