Description:
On Saturday, February 7 2009, Brendan Sokaluk took a short drive down a gravel road and, according to his testimony, flicked a lit ciga rette wrapped in a paper serviette out the window, thus igniting one of the most devastating of the many fires already burning on that dreadful day.
Description:
Although livestock welfare issues were once barely visible to mainstream consumers, animal welfare activists now combine traditional public media advocacy with digital media advocacy to spread their campaign message and mobilise consumers. This article examines one attempt to mainstream animal welfare issues: Animals Australia's' 'Make It Possible' multimedia campaign. Specifically, we contend that the campaign puts into circulation an 'affective economy' (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b) aimed at proposing and entrenching new modes of everyday behaviour. Core affective positions and their circulation in this economy are considered from three interrelated articulations of this campaign: the release of and public response to the YouTube campaign video; Coles' short-lived offering of campaign shopping bags; and public engagement in the 'My Make It Possible Story' website. Analysis also opens up broader questions concerning the relationship between online activism and everyday life, asking how articulations in one domain translate to everyday practices.
Description:
Although livestock welfare issues were once barely visible to mainstream consumers, animal welfare activists now combine traditional public media advocacy with digital media advocacy to spread their campaign message and mobilise consumers. This article examines one attempt to mainstream animal welfare issues: Animals Australia's' 'Make It Possible' multimedia campaign. Specifically, we contend that the campaign puts into circulation an 'affective economy' (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b) aimed at proposing and entrenching new modes of everyday behaviour. Core affective positions and their circulation in this economy are considered from three interrelated articulations of this campaign: the release of and public response to the YouTube campaign video; Coles' short-lived offering of campaign shopping bags; and public engagement in the 'My Make It Possible Story' website. Analysis also opens up broader questions concerning the relationship between online activism and everyday life, asking how articulations in one domain translate to everyday practices.
Description:
The ecological underpinnings of our world are at risk. Despite efforts by governments and the international community to set in place some protection for the global environment, industrialisation, economic development, and modern corporate-driven consumerist lifestyles are all contributing to the pollution that is driving climate change. According to the 2007 Assessment Report carried out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), since the start of industrialisation in the eighteenth century, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane) have markedly increased, primarily as a result of human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and changes in agriculture and other land-uses. Closer to home, human-caused greenhouse gas emissions have increased globally by 70 percent between 1970 and 2004, with carbon dioxide levels increasing by 80 percent within this same period (IPCC 2007). The panel's report further details that 'atmospheric concentrations of C[O.sub.2] [carbon dioxide] and C[H.sub.4] [methane] in 2005 exceed by far the natural range of the last 650,000 years' (IPCC 2007, p. 37; cf. Global Carbon Project 2010). Indeed, while the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere prior to the industrial revolution was 280 parts per million (ppm), in 2008 it measured 385 ppm, with an annual increase of nearly 2 ppm; furthermore, since the year 2000 carbon dioxide emissions have been growing at four times the pace of the rate of the 1990s (Global Carbon Project 2010).
Description:
Although livestock welfare issues were once barely visible to mainstream consumers, animal welfare activists now combine traditional public media advocacy with digital media advocacy to spread their campaign message and mobilise consumers. This article examines one attempt to mainstream animal welfare issues: Animals Australia's' 'Make It Possible' multimedia campaign. Specifically, we contend that the campaign puts into circulation an 'affective economy' (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b) aimed at proposing and entrenching new modes of everyday behaviour. Core affective positions and their circulation in this economy are considered from three interrelated articulations of this campaign: the release of and public response to the YouTube campaign video; Coles' short-lived offering of campaign shopping bags; and public engagement in the 'My Make It Possible Story' website. Analysis also opens up broader questions concerning the relationship between online activism and everyday life, asking how articulations in one domain translate to everyday practices.
Description:
A recurrent concern in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts of Australians in London is how "well" writers were doing. The common conception of the trip "Home" to Britain as a quest for cultural and professional success or recognition is reflected in the title of Angela Woollacott's feminist history, To Try Her Fortune in London, and it motivated many Australian writers, even a nationalist republican such as Henry Lawson, to regard London as the centre of literary culture, the best place in which to exercise their talents and ambitions. The emergence in these decades of a generation of "native-born" white Australian travellers who were related to but self-consciously different from the parent stock both in the colonies and in Britain created an anxious interest which fuelled ongoing discussions in newspapers and periodicals, prompted the creation of Anglo-Australian networks, clubs and publications in London, and supported many a columnist or special correspondent reporting back to Australia on the doings of their contemporaries in the great metropolis.
Description:
We know the world, our world, through stories (Turner 1988: 68). Stories in childhood, whether verbal or written, are inevitably accompanied by visual language forms. This might be the storyteller’s body or a puppet performing mime and gesture; it may be pictures in storybooks, or the endless hybrid combinations of these in film and the electronic media. Even a single photograph can perform in a narrative way: “A picture of a forest tells implicitly of trees growing from seedlings and shedding leaves; and a picture of a house implies that trees were cut for it and that its roof will soon leak. (Goodman 1981:111)” Within a story–making activity, however, the visual image is not a sole performer; it is a participant in an intertextual web of discursive forms and endless meaning-making exercises. It is a complex, fluid experience (Belova 2006). The aim of this paper is to raise some questions about how narrative processes might operate in and through visual texts designed to communicate social injustice and elicit emotional and moral response, such as social documentary photographs and fundraising campaign posters. Using the example of an Australian Salvation Army Red Shield Appeal poster, the paper reflects on how the engaged viewer might be implicated as both character and author in the resonance between the meta–narratives and personal stories from their own life–world and the meanings arising from the poster’s text. In doing so, concepts of interpellation and intertextuality help explain some of the processes which position and compel viewers to respond, and also how they contribute to identifying meanings which reach beyond commonly received readings.
Description:
As platforms for self-expression, social media sites require users to consciously, visibly, and deliberately perform their identity. While a dominant developmental discourse encourages young people to test and explore different identities, a self-conscious and highly visible performance of identity via social media brings into question the form and value of this activity. This article reviews a range of popular arguments about how young people use media, and demonstrates how this use comes into conflict with a broader developmental discourse. It proposes that this conflict contributes to the perception that young people's media use is dangerous for healthy development, and that a different kind of approach to youth is needed. Engaging Judith Butler's notion of performativity, the article argues that social media and the structures of performative display are a way to reconceptualise youth and the relationship between social media and young people's self-development.
Description:
This paper is concerned with onomastic palimpsests in Victoria, Australia, focusing in particular on the 1870s, when the deliberate erasure of colonial names and their replacement with Indigenous names was at the forefront of government policy. In contextualizing this reinstatement of Indigenous toponyms, the paper highlights the agency of parliamentarian and government minister Hon. Robert Ramsay. The primary sources of data are newspaper articles and official government reports. The methodology used is “thick description”. The findings reveal that the government’s efforts were grounded in the collection and collation of place names and vocabulary from Aboriginal people in the previous decade by district surveyors and other local officials. Consistent with recent campaigns in Victoria, the sustained efforts by governments in the 1870s were driven by a desire to remove duplication, erase inappropriate non-Aboriginal place names, and preserve Aboriginal place names. The campaign is unparalleled in the history of Victoria’s toponymic administration.
Description:
This paper engages with contemporary debates around the mediation of distant suffering by examining the ways in which news selection and reporting interpellate audiences into communities of feeling, in which affective belonging is structured by multimodal rhetorical strategies. Concepts drawn from discursive psychology and systemic-functional linguistics (appraisal theory) are used to show how news coverage of natural disasters positions audiences affectively. Analysis of Australian print media coverage of the 2009 Australian bushfires and the 2010 Haiti earthquake will be used to show how this process differs for local and international events. The paper contributes to debates on the “emotionalisation” of public culture by exploring the precise functions of affect within disaster reporting; in particular, how the production of various kinds of affects in the wake of a disaster shapes local and global publics.
Description:
In 2008, the Australian Law Reform Commission journal, Reform, called out animal welfare as Australia’s ‘next great social justice movement’ in 2018; however, public mobilisation around animal welfare is still a contested issue in Australia. The question stands as to how to mobilise everyday mainstream consumers into supporting animal activism given that animal activism is presented in the public sphere as dampening the economic livelihood of Australia, with some animal activism described as ‘akin to terrorism’. The questions, then, are as follows: how to mobilise everyday mainstream consumers into supporting animal activist ideals? How to frame and communicate animal activist ideals so that they can come to inform and change the behaviour and self-understandings of mainstream consumers? This article is an investigation into the possible production and mobilisation of animal activists from mainstream consumers through the work of one digital campaign, Make it Possible. Delivered by the peak Australian animal advocacy organisation, Animals Australia, and explicitly targeting the lived experiences and conditions of animals in factory farming, Make it Possible reached nearly 12 million viewers across Australia and has directly impacted on the reported behaviour and self-understandings of over 291,000 Australians to date, as well as impacting policy decisions made by government and industry. More specifically, our interest is to engage a new materialist lens to draw out how this campaign operates to transform consumers into veg*ns (vegans/vegetarians), activists and ethical consumers who materially commit to and live revised beliefs regarding human–animal relations.
Description:
This article investigates the phenomenon of tourist visitation to an Aboriginal Mission Station in the Wimmera region of Victoria, Australia, during its operation from 1859 to 1904. It provides an overview of the history of tourism to Aboriginal missions in Victoria and presents the first detailed study of tourism to the Ebenezer Mission site. It shows that in contrast with other mission stations in Victoria, where tourism was encouraged, the Moravian missionaries discouraged visitation and deliberately selected a remote location in northwest Victoria to ensure their isolation. Nevertheless, a limited number of visitors were welcomed on to the station and their accounts are presented in this case study. Copyright Cognizant Communication Corporation (CCC)
Description:
Print and electronic media coverage of disasters raises a multitude of issues about the media’s role during and after a crisis. This article focuses on a specific issue: the affective dimension of news media coverage immediately following a crisis. The selection and presentation of bushfire stories not only disseminates information but elicits emotion from audiences. I use textual and visual analysis of The Age newspaper’s coverage of the 2009 Victorian bushfires to examine the discursive structuring of affect. Comparisons are made with coverage of earlier bushfire disasters (the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires and the 1939 Black Friday fires) in order to investigate changes in the visual and verbal discourses of bushfire reporting. The article demonstrates that there is an intensification of affect in contemporary media coverage that is not present in the coverage of previous bushfires, and that this has implications for the role of the emotions in public life and for our conception of the public sphere.