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Manipulative silences and the politics of representation of boat children in Australian print media

- McLaren, Helen, Patil, Tejaswini

Authors: McLaren, Helen , Patil, Tejaswini
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Continuum Vol. 30, no. 6 (2016), p. 602-612
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Description: There is substantial literature on media representations of asylum seeker policy in Australia from a number of theoretical standpoints, namely moral panic theory, whiteness studies and belonging and citizenship. While many of these studies use discourse analysis of textual media as a methodology, there is scant attention to the contribution of manipulative silences in media texts on asylum seeker children. Using a form of discourse analysis to explore the idea of manipulative silences, we demonstrate how media representations may steer public attention towards asylum seeker children in two dominant ways: (i) in discourses of deviancy by association with adults and (ii) the rights of boat children in association with immigration detention. Both generate confusion between rights, compassion and deviancy and, by shifting public attention, they serve to silence more essential concerns for the children. We seek to analyses these manipulative silences in the context of Australian asylum seeker policies of the Abbott government. In elucidating the use of textual silences to manipulate discourse, it is possible to see how Australian media representations may be skewing dialogue in the public sphere away from core political, legal and humanitarian issues that are imperative for the well-being of asylum seeker children. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

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Doing animal welfare activism everyday : Questions of identity

- Rodan, Debbie, Mummery, Jane

Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Continuum-Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 30, no. 4 (2016), p. 381-396
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Description: Animals Australia focuses on making animal welfare issues visible to consumers so as to direct consumer behaviour and invoke everyday activism, an objective integral to their Make it Possible' campaign. In this paper, we primarily explore the claimed and practised identity of everyday or mainstream animal activists. This is an identity that, whilst partially and communally elaborated and affirmed online (in the online Animals Australia community), is enacted more commonly through personal and familial everyday actions such as shopping, cooking and eating than it is through such public actions as explicitly advocating or demonstrating for better welfare standards for animals involved in factory farming. A discourse analysis was conducted of 2198 posts from October 2013 to January 2014 to analyse contributors' accounts of their feelings (notably their gut reactions) and reasons for pledging, as well as to examine how contributors' accounts of their everyday practices might be understood as the development of a voice for these voiceless animals'. Overall, then, our analysis has shown supporters, participants and/or consumers who support the Make it Possible' campaign self-select into and identify themselves in terms of four overlapping frames: being vegan or vegetarian, shopping for change, personal activism and public activism and advocacy. This paper contributes to the debate concerning intersectional activism within the food activism movement.

Learning the past to participate in the future : Regional discourses of Australian colonial history

- Koerner, Catherine

Authors: Koerner, Catherine
Date: 2013
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: International Journal of Critical Indigenous Studies Vol. 6, no. 2 (2013), p. 29-40
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Description: Indigenous curricula content, including particular narratives of Australian colonial history are highly contested in contemporary Australia. How do white Australians understand Australia’s colonial past and its relevance today? An empirical study was conducted with 29 rural Australians who self-identified as white. Critical race and whiteness studies provided the framework for analysis of the interviews. I argue that they revealed a delimited understanding of colonial history and a general inability to link this to the present, which limited their capacity to think crossculturally in their everyday living - activities considered crucial in the contemporary move to Reconciliation in Australia. The normative discourse of white settler Australians to be ‘Australian’ is invested in the denial of Indigenous sovereignty to protect white settler Australian claims to national sovereignty. The findings support arguments for a national curriculum that incorporates Indigenous history as well as an Indigenous presence throughout all subject areas.

South East Asian migrant experiences in regional Victoria: Exploring well-being

- Townsend, Robert, Pascal, Jan, Delves, Mel

Authors: Townsend, Robert , Pascal, Jan , Delves, Mel
Date: 2014
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Journal of Sociology Vol. 50, no. 4 (December 2014 2014), p. 601-615
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Description: This article outlines a recent pilot project in Bendigo that collected baseline data in order to develop a preliminary understanding of regional migration experiences. The literature indicated that migrant experiences in Australian regional communities are under-researched. Sixty participants from South East Asia, who have migrated to Bendigo, Victoria within the last five years, completed a mixed-methods survey. The key findings reported upon are socio-structural factors, social connectedness and psychosocial well-being. Crucial factors such as culture, spirituality and non-English-language, link to the more complex issues of personal, social and cultural identity. These findings are significant in adding to the limited data and discussion about newly arrived migrants in rural and regional communities. There are sociological implications from this preliminary data concerning social capital and psychosocial well-being. There are also implications for policy development and professional practice for migration to rural and regional communities.
Description: C1

Theories of state formation and civilisation in Johann P Arnason and Shmuel Eisenstadt's comparative sociologies of Japan

- Smith, Jeremy

Authors: Smith, Jeremy
Date: 2002
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Critical Horizons: A Journal of Social and Critical Theory Vol. 3, no. 2 (2002), p. 225-251
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Description: Johann Arnason and Shmuel Eisenstadt's social theories have remarkably different origins. Yet each has moved onto common ground with the other over a period of time. They meet in historical sociology in dialogue over theories of state formation and images of civilisation. Each is engaged in a project of revising civilisations sociology that reaches an apex with the comparative study of Japan.Their groundbreaking contributions can be read critically against a wider background of debates about postcolonialism, the reputation of the notion of civilisation and the state of area studies in the humanities and social sciences.
Description: C1
Description: 2003000177

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Ever widening circles of compassion

- Koerner, Catherine

Authors: Koerner, Catherine
Date: 2019
Type: Text , Journal article , Editorial Material
Relation: Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Vol. , no. (June 2019), p. 6
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Description: This paper argues that Darwin’s work relied upon patriarchal white assumptions of entitlement to knowledge, their objects and the processes of knowledge production. It assumed an objective observer and fashioned their conquest of knowledge, knowledge production and the objects of knowledge to fit patriarchal white supremacist views. I posit that this materialist view has been promulgated as the only legitimate view, despite being debunked within quantum physics and quantum cosmology, and has led us to these dark times. The consequences risk the future of the planet and all its sentient inhabitants. However, Charles Darwin also posited in his meticulous observations that evolutionary development depends on ever-widening circles of compassion as the deepest primal instinct of all creatures – a view shared by First Nations peoples, such as Indigenous Australians colonised under Liberal/Neoliberal regimes and Tibetan (and others) colonised under Communist regimes. Neoliberalism has increased the intensity of consequences in Australia; however, this paper argues that the concept of a shared origin is the fundamental error about the nature of reality presented in metaphysical realism in triad with extractive possessive consumerism. The latter prioritises economic growth and hedonism and values only external happiness rather than a Eunomia understanding of wellbeing, where Eunomia refers to a general sense of inner wellbeing not caused by perceived external stimuli. CRAWS scholars can draw on ever widening circles of compassion as First Nation and critical ally scholars, educators and activists, to reorient our past understanding and present mindful embodiment for a fiercely compassionate future.

Kiarostami's picture theory : Cinematic skepticism in the Wind Will Carry Us

- Abbott, Mathew

Authors: Abbott, Mathew
Date: 2013
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Sub-Stance Vol. 42, no. 1 (2013), p. 165-179
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Description: The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) opens with a series of long takes of a car winding steadily down a road in the Iranian countryside. In other words, it opens with a sequence which, to anybody who knows Kiarostami's work, will be immediately recognizable as typical of it: Life and Nothing More (1992) returns repeatedly to such sequences, and ends with one; such sequences turn up in Through the Olive Trees (1994) and Taste of Cherry (1997); the protagonist of Where is the Friend's Home? (1987) is too young to drive, but we see him from a distance meandering in a similar pattern on more than one occasion (and sequences of the same type return in Certified Copy (2010)). As with the other sequences, the opening of The Wind Will Carry Us is beautiful, intriguing and, with its muted semi-screwball feel, kind of funny. By the time of the film's release, however, the car on screen was bringing this cinematic history with it. Thus there is something self-aware or even self-effacing about these opening images: Kiarostami is referring here, both seriously and playfully, not only to his previous works but also perhaps to himself, and to the by-then internationally recognizable figure called "Kiarostami." So if Jean-Luc Nancy is right to say that such long aerial takes are Kiarostami's "signature" ( Evidence of Film, 10)âthat "a person or a car's zigzagging path on the background of an unchanging landscape traverses, like a single trajectory, five movies [...] and turns into an emblematic summary of all the films" (24)âthen this is complicated here by a certain irony. Indeed it would be possible to read the reflexivity of these images as playfully mocking Kiarostami's own signature, and thus perhaps as problematizing the very notion: Kiarostami doesn't let us forget that we are watching one of his films, and pokes fun at us, and at himself, in reminding that fact. This is to say that in the opening sequence of the film Kiarostami cites his own signature, with all the epistemological and metaphysical complications that such a gesture entails. Yet this self-effacing gesture is not simply ironic, and it is not in spite but also partly because of its extreme reflexivity that the opening sequence of this film in particular is so beautiful, intriguing, and gently funny. After all, gestures of self effacementâironic nods to the mediality of cinemaâare perhaps as typical of Kiarostami's films as are long aerial takes of meandering cars. If Kiarostami is citing his own signature, then that is also his signature. Thus I want to disagree with Nancy when he writes that "there is no room for reflexivity" (18) in Kiarostami's cinema. Yet I also want to agree with the intuition that appears to be guiding Nancy's statement. For what's remarkable about Kiarostami's films is how his relentless problematization of the real, his dogged insistence on the mediality of the image, does not leave us in some Baudrillardian hall of mirrors, or quasi-Derridean free play of significations: if the opening sequence of this film is an example of "intertextuality," it is not because Kiarostami is spruiking some pop postmodernism. Rather, in problematizating the category of representation in this way, Kiarostami has been able to raise the question of the real in a new and profoundly affecting manner. His repeated attempts at turning our attention to the medium itself, to the very fact of film, do not produce a Verfremdungseffekt. Or if they do, this distancing is bound up with the powers of the films themselves. Note that this is not really paradoxical: my argument is that what Kiarostami shows is how the real can be evokedâ or "evidenced," to use Nancy's termâ precisely by undermining our attachments to the philosophical picture and cinematic frame of representation.
Description: 2003011023

Rural homophobia : Not really gay

- Gottschalk, Lorene, Newton, Janice

Authors: Gottschalk, Lorene , Newton, Janice
Date: 2009
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Gay & Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review Vol. 5, no. 3 (2009), p. 153-159
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Description: This study, conducted for the Department of Human Services (Grampians Region) in Victoria, found that gay men and lesbians experience similar types of stigma and discrimination in rural areas as those in urban centres, but that this was exacerbated by the lack of anonymity in the smaller communities. The hatred of homosexuality can, in some relatively supportive family, community, school and work contexts, transform into a homophobia that embodies a fear of homosexuality which can, and not infrequently does, result in homophobic abuse and violence. Although the majority of research participants in this study were accepting of their sexuality and happy to be lesbian or gay, they nevertheless lived curtailed lives with a blanket around a central dimension of their lives. Furthermore it was found that the experience of gay men is not a mirror image of that for lesbians.
Description: 2003008014

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Student management in Chinese higher education institutions

- Jiang, Xiaoli, Ma, Xiaoping, Wu, Yumei

Authors: Jiang, Xiaoli , Ma, Xiaoping , Wu, Yumei
Date: 2009
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management Vol. 9, no. 11 (2009), p. 45-58
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Description: This study investigated six Chinese higher education institutions in relation to management of their students. The results indicate Chinese higher education institutions place a greater emphasis on controlling students in order to achieve desired outcomes according to their national ideology and cultural values. Control measures are intended to ensure good class attendance, collective teamwork and discipline. Their student management focuses on extrinsic rewards and punishments to promote desirable moral values and ethics. A very comprehensive control system is in place to achieve these goals. Students are encouraged to manage fellow students. The research also identified that prestigious universities with a higher level of entry scores place less control measures on their students compared to their counterparts with lower entry scores. Chinese higher education management believes the measures to control students are designed to combat negative elements of human beings. This study provides an understanding into the reasons why current higher education management practices exist in China and offers some explanations from historical, political and social culture perspectives. The study will assist Western educators to better understand the challenges facing Chinese students studying abroad. Â© Common Ground.
Description: 2003007993

Managing a marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and fat acceptance cybercommunities

- Smith, Naomi, Wickes, Rebecca, Underwood, Mair

Authors: Smith, Naomi , Wickes, Rebecca , Underwood, Mair
Date: 2015
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Journal of Sociology Vol. 51, no. 4 (2015), p. 950-967
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Description: This study examines how members of pro-anorexia (PA) and fat acceptance (FA) cybercommunities manage their ascribed ‘offline’ socially marginalised identity in an ‘online’ environment. While much of the sociological literature continues to focus on the corporeal or face-to-face practices of socially marginalised groups, we use online non-participant observation to explore how members of these sites use the internet to manage their marginalised identities. We find that cybercommunities provide a safe place for identity management where members come together to understand, negotiate and, at times, reject the marginalised identity ascribed to them in their offline environment. From the accounts of the PA and FA members we studied, we find that online and offline identities are mutually reinforcing and collectively inform and shape identity. However, the online environment provides an anonymised space for identity work, emotional support and an acceptance of their body, whatever their shape or size. © The Author(s) 2013.

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Reading, writing and unruliness : Female education in the St Trinian's films

- Speed, Lesley

Authors: Speed, Lesley
Date: 2002
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: International Journal of Cultural Studies Vol. 5, no. 2 (2002), p. 221-238
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Description: This article examines how the St Trinian’s films (1954–1980) engage with shifts in the social organization of gender and class, while celebrating the defiance of social constraints on women. Focusing on the films’ depiction of unruly female behaviour, the article addresses the historical and social dimensions of the films in relation to carnival, adolescence and education. The films express public responses to the increasing public significance of female youth, and celebrate the predominantly female environment of the girls’ school.
Description: C1
Description: 2003002837

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Towards an inclusive curation of WWI heritage: integrating historical aerial photographs, digital museum applications and landscape markers in “Flanders Fields” (Belgium)

- Stichelbaut, Birger, Plets, Gertjan, Reeves, Keir

Authors: Stichelbaut, Birger , Plets, Gertjan , Reeves, Keir
Date: 2021
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development Vol. 11, no. 4 (2021), p. 344-360
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Description: Purpose: Over a century of state-sponsored construction of monuments, historic mythmaking and nationalist framings of WWI has ensured that it has become notoriously difficult to present the heritage of the Great War in an inclusive and non-selective way. In this paper the authors present a strategy and technology-driven solutions to overcome the selective heritage curation of modern conflict. Design/methodology/approach: Building on a suite of tools, applications and cultural heritage management plans developed by the In Flanders Fields Museum (IFFM), this paper explores the challenges of preserving and curating conflict heritage. The authors investigate the philosophy, cultural heritage management strategies and exhibitions used to curate the heritage of the Ypres Salient (Belgium). Findings: The paper argues that historical aerial photographs integrated in multimedia exhibits present themselves as a fascinating source bringing the landscape within the walls of the museum. Mobile augmented reality (AR) applications developed by the museum go one step beyond and bring museum techniques to the landscape. Research limitations/implications: This paper presents a strategy to present, manage and curate the entirety of conflict heritage from the modern period. Faced with growing politicisation and memorialisation of modern conflict, it is extremely important that inclusive heritage management and curation is insured. The reflections on different curatorial techniques used by the IFFM can contribute globally towards a better heritage engagement. Practical implications: An innovative and meaningful framework enables a more historically nuanced visitor experience to key heritage sites throughout the Ypres Salient. Social implications: Ensuring a non-selective heritage experience is especially pressing today. Over the past century canonised and national narratives have prescribed our understanding of the First World War across Europe and beyond. Originality/value: Adopting a critical stance towards the proliferation in AR apps and applying theories from anthropology and phenomenology has been developed combining AR with arboreal landscape relics. © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited.

ASMR, affect and digitally-mediated intimacy

- Smith, Naomi, Snider, Anne-Marie

Authors: Smith, Naomi , Snider, Anne-Marie
Date: 2019
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Emotion, Space and Society Vol. 30, no. (2019), p. 41-48
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Description: ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is the pseudo-scientific term used to describe a ‘tingly’ physical response that viewers of ASMR videos may experience from watching a combination of auditory, visual and tactile triggers. To explore how this might happen, we examine the experience of ASMR as a technologically-mediated, affective experience, using examples from prominent ASMR artists. We seek to understand this community of ASMR viewers through the disjuncture that exists between the embodied experience of tingles and deep relaxation, and its technologically-mediated delivery. In this paper, we explore ASMR as a mediated affective experience – uniquely shaped by online spaces and their affordances. After providing a brief overview of ASMR videos and creators, we explore how ASMR artists engage in boundary work through the definitions of ASMR that they produce to support a quest for cultural and scientific legitimacy. The practice of naming and defining ASMR creates a site affective 'stickiness’, where affective experiences are intentionally constructed and strategically heightened. Finally, we examine the provocations that research into ASMR may bring an understanding of the senses, affect and technologically-mediated intimacy.

The animal for which animality is an issue : Nietzsche, agamben, and the anthropological machine

- Abbott, Mathew

Authors: Abbott, Mathew
Date: 2011
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Angelaki - Journal of the Theoretical Humanities Vol. 16, no. 4 (2011), p. 87-99
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Description: There is congruence between Nietzsche’s philosophy of life and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben. For both philosophers the human animal possesses a divided relationship to its being alive. For both philosophers this division is of a political nature, such that membership in political community as we know it is conditional on the human animal’s alienation from its biological being. Both philosophers are also concerned with the possibility of transformation and, because of the connection they establish between politics and animality, link this possibility to a change in the relationship between humans and their being alive. Yet both philosophers end up with an entirely different understanding of the nature of this change, and of its potential scope.

Making sense of sound : Visceral sonic mapping as a research tool

- Duffy, Michelle, Waitt, Gordon, Harada, Theresa

Authors: Duffy, Michelle , Waitt, Gordon , Harada, Theresa
Date: 2016
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Emotion, Space and Society Vol. 20, no. (2016), p. 49-57
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Description: This paper offers a contribution to ongoing discussions of the role of sound for producing geographical knowledge. It is argued that sound is an inherent component of critical research of emotions, society and space. Yet we note that there is a lack of practical advice as to how this might come about. In this paper we offer a methodological approach for the analysis of sound that we term visceral sonic mapping to help critical geographers progress enlivening geography through recent rethinking of ‘the body’. First, we provide a progress report to chart theoretical and methodological approaches to sound within geography and cognate disciplines. We then sketch a theoretical understanding of the visceral and our visceral sonic mapping. To demonstrate how this method might be productively put to use we draw on empirical material from a driving ethnography that was undertaken in a regional Australian centre from 2010 to 2011. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd

Planes of illusion: Music soundtrack, rendition and attribution in Sanctum

- Fitzgerald, Jon, Hayward, Philip, Brennan, David

Authors: Fitzgerald, Jon , Hayward, Philip , Brennan, David
Date: 2012
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Perfect Beat Vol. 13, no. 2 (2012), p. 111-126
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Description: Mainstream commercial cinema's increasing access to highly advanced computer-generated imagery (CGI) has allowed it to produce convincing evocations of places and experiences that increasingly blur the line between the represented 'real' of actual locations and digitally generated fictional spaces. This article discusses one such evocation: the spectacular cave system featured in the film Sanctum (2011), directed by Alister Grierson. The frst part of this article examines the manner in which audio-visual elements of the film produce a representation of a Papua New Guinean landscape and locale and, in particular, analyses the manner in which David Hirschfelder's score provides an element of musical exoticism that serves to complement this. The second part of the article discusses issues of cultural use relevant to the film score's prominent use of an unattributed vocal sequence. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013.

“Be Careful, Cowboy” : The translation and mutation of the western genre in Red Hill

- Moll, Nicholas

Authors: Moll, Nicholas
Date: 2017
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Critical Arts Vol. 31, no. 5 (2017), p. 115-127
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Description: The western genre has long been hailed as an iconic expression of the United States’ history and culture. However, the 2010 Australian film Red Hill (dir. Patrick Hughes, 2010) actively engages the genre’s tropes, styles, and conventions. In doing so, the film converts the ideas of a ruggedly individualistic frontier, key to the western genre and the popularised notions of nineteenth-century United States expansion, to the contemporary Australian context, providing a translation and mutation of the western genre. This paper argues that, through disassociation of the western genre from the United States, Red Hill’s frontier is made Australian over the course of the film, exploring the lingering traumas and ongoing violence of a specific colonisation process. Drawing on theories of genre, history, and postcolonialism, this paper investigates the exploration of national character, history, and boundaries through the western genre. In doing so, this paper situates the western genre as having a nationalistic function in general, rather than one associated with any particular nation, and as providing a touchstone for ideas of history and themes of colonial expansion in a contentious landscape of class, race, and society.

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Renditions from the inside : Prison Songs, documusical and performative documentary

- Speed, Lesley

Authors: Speed, Lesley
Date: 2019
Type: Text , Journal article
Relation: Continuum-Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 33, no. 3 (2019), p. 324-336
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Description: Produced for SBS Television, Kelrick Martin's Prison Songs is unusual as a documentary in which the participants convey their stories through songs that were written for the film. Centring on inmates of Darwin Correctional Centre, known as Berrimah Prison, and described in its press kit as 'Australia's first ever documentary musical', Prison Songs involved a collaborative production process in which inmates contributed to writing the musical numbers. As a documusical, the film belongs to a documentary subgenre that originated in the United Kingdom and forms part of a wider landscape of convergence between non-fiction and fictional television. Prison Songs expands Australian documentary, contemporary Indigenous film-making and stories about incarceration. The film's presentation of participants' experiences through music, story, dance and humour can be situated within the performative documentary mode, in which orthodox screen discourses of sobriety are supplanted by poetic expression. Its use of songs and musical performance as partial alternatives to interviews and narration traverses boundaries between avant-garde and television forms, expression and information, and prison and the wider society.

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