bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Rise of Digital Multimedia Systems
Authors: Gibson Ross
Published: November 2014

With this essay, I want to understand why interactive and relational media forms have become so ubiquitous so quickly. Comparing the nexus of cinema and nationalism with the contemporary dyad of digital media and transnationalism (or globalisation), we can ask whether digital multimedia systems have arisen to reflect and impel our contemporary psychic and social conditions. Because multimedia rarely gets ‘locked-off’, its component elements can always be pulled apart, sent back to their databases and then instantaneously rearranged into newly iterated federations. In this respect it is like our unstable contemporary lives, so buffeted with ever-altering values, opportunities, anxieties and obligations all upwelling because of globalisation, migration and multiculturalism.
Celebrating the Secular
Authors: Lohrey Amanda
Published: November 2014

On 4 November 2004 I read a report in the Sydney Morning Herald that I found genuinely shocking, a statement by Cardinal George Pell, of the Catholic diocese of Sydney, on what’s wrong with democracy. This report was of a speech given to the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in the United States. In it, Dr Pell told his audience that liberal democracy is a world of ‘empty secularism’ that is over-focused on ‘individual autonomy’. The problem with democracy, said the Cardinal, quoting John Paul II, is that it is not a good thing in itself; its value depends on the moral vision that it serves, and a secular democracy is lacking in moral vision. If democracy is not a good thing in and of itself, then why have we sent troops to Iraq to enable it? And what about the principle of equality before the law? Freedom of conscience? Freedom of speech and of action? Responsibility for community? Sounds like a moral vision to me.
Towards an Ethical Multiculturalism
Authors: Turner Graeme
Published: November 2014

A review of Scott Poynting, Greg Noble, Paul Tabar and Jock Collins' Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other (Sydney Institute of Criminology, Sydney, 2004).
Symmetrical Modernities?
Authors: Fleming Chris , O'Carroll John
Published: November 2014

A review of Jane Bennett's The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings and Ethics (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2001).
Introduction
Authors: Allon Fiona , Morris Meaghan
Published: November 2014

The article introduces the theme of this issue, 'Cultural Research'. It outlines the contributions and provides them with a scholarly context.
From Criticism to Research: The 'Textual' in the Academy
Authors: Morris Meaghan
Published: November 2014

When the first joint workshop on cultural research between the University of Western Sydney’s Centre for Cultural Research (CCR) and the Department of Cultural Studies at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University (LU) began in July 2002, I had to admit to a little uncertainty in opening the proceedings. It was a novel experience for me to speak in Sydney as a member of a foreign delegation, and I spent an anxious moment wondering how to pitch my remarks: should I be telling old friends from UWS about what we do at Lingnan, or introducing new friends from Hong Kong to the Sydney—no, the Parramatta-based environment where we would spend the next few days?
Consumption: Why Does It Matter in Cultural Research?
Authors: Choi Kimburley Wing Yee
Published: November 2014

Prompted by the opening of Hong Kong Disneyland, journalists from different countries interviewed Hong Kong scholars about their views on the project. The first question that all these journalists asked was, what is the cultural impact of Disneyland on Hong Kong? The author uses this case to explore the role of consumption within cultural research.
From Cobra Grubs to Dragons: Negotiating the Politics of Representation in Cultural Research
Authors: Dreher Tanja
Published: November 2014

‘From cobra grubs to dragons’ was suggested as the title for a cultural tour of the Fairfield area in Sydney developed by the author and others through a partnership between the Centre for Cultural Research (CCR) at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), the Fairfield City Council (FCC) and the Migration Heritage Centre of the NSW government. The cultural researchers involved in producing the tour felt that this title was an evocative description of the tour which enables participants to visit numerous sites associated with Fairfield’s cultural diversity. As the project developed, a key funding partner vetoed that title, to be replaced by the prosaic ‘Tune in to Fairfield City: a multicultural driving tour’ which now appears on the audio CD and map which contain instructions for motorists to take the tour. This article analyses the rather more complex issues of naming and representation, voice and authority raised by this cultural research project.
Anti-Ageing Cultures, Biopolitics and Globalisation
Authors: Neilson Brett
Published: November 2014

In March 2004, the author attended the Inaugural International Conference on Longevity at the Sydney Exhibition and Convention Centre in Darling Harbour. As a cultural researcher interested in the interactions between demographic shifts, capitalist globalisation and changing forms of political power, the prospect of a direct encounter with the debates and practices surrounding the burgeoning field of anti-ageing medicine promised a means to observe the complex cultural dynamics of population ageing at play. This article explores the discord the atuhor witnessed; a quarrel that, despite the march of technological advance, attests the ongoing conflict in the nexus where politics meets life.
Contextual Utility and Practicality: Cultural Research for the School Community in Hong Kong
Authors: Hui Po-Keung , Chan Stephen C.K.
Published: November 2014

As an intellectual project, is cultural studies actually ‘useless’ in dealing with issues closely tied to students’ everyday practices? In this article, the authors examine the problem through the case of teacher training and curriculum development in the context of educational reform in Hong Kong—in particular, through a community-interface project we are engaged in as cultural researchers at the moment.
Sensational Studies
Authors: Caldwell Peter
Published: November 2014

A review of David Howes (ed.), Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (Berg, Oxford, 2005) and Constance Classen (ed.), The Book of Touch (Berg, Oxford, 2005).
The Desire for Connection—Shame and its Many Faces
Authors: Zournazi Mary
Published: November 2014

A review of Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2005).
Understanding Celebrity and the Public Sphere
Authors: Green Leila
Published: November 2014

A review of Alan McKee, The Public Sphere: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2005) and Graeme Turner, Understanding Celebrity (Sage, London, 2004).
Sporting Authenticity
Authors: Moller Michael
Published: November 2014

A review of Barry Smart, The Sport Star: Modern Sport and the Cultural Economy of Sporting Celebrity (Sage, Thousand Oaks and London, 2005).
The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy
Authors: Harman Graham
Published: November 2014

This article explores the importance of French thinker, Bruno Latour, for academic philosophy and addresses the question of why, when he has an enthusiastic following in a range of disciplines including sociology, anthropology and the fine arts, he has been largely overlooked by academic philosophers.
T.W. Adorno: Cinema in Spite of Itself—But Cinema all the Same
Authors: Brenez Nicole
Published: November 2014

This article discusses T.W. Adorno's criticisms of cinema, and how he saw it in terms of cultural commodification.
Going Nowhere? The Politics of Remembering (and Forgetting) Molly Ringwald
Authors: Lee Christina
Published: November 2014

This article focuses on the actor Molly Ringwald, forever famous for her roles in a series of 1980s teen films directed by John Hughes, to explore notions of generational remembering and forgetting.
Desire and the Abject in the City Becoming-Other
Authors: Fitzgerald John , Threadgold Terry
Published: November 2014

When The Age renamed the corner of Russell and Bourke streets the ‘Golden Elbow’ it brought the city into close proximity with an altogether different city. Neither Chang Mai, Hong Kong nor Melbourne, the Golden Elbow was defined by what it could be. Neither one thing (Melbourne) nor another (somewhere else), the Golden Elbow is a space of the city-becoming-other. Through narrative work and news media maps of no-go zones, machines mobilise fear and thus value, from the desire flowing through this abject zone. Capitalism sucks value from these encounters through the production of fear as affect. The city-becoming-other is both enormously productive, and destructive of bodies caught up in the mix. This article explores the flow of desire and the abject of a city becoming other through a street drug marketplace.  The encounter with the abject brings use closer to the beauty and fear of ontological mixity.
Translating Worlds: Is Petyarre’s Work Abstract?
Authors: Ferrell Robyn
Published: November 2014

This article explores the work of Indigenous artist  Kathleen Petyarre, particularly in how modern (abstract) techniques and aesthetics intersect with traditional approaches.
Intimate Australia: Body/Landscape Journals and the Paradox of Belonging
Authors: Slater Lisa
Published: November 2014

This article offers a discussion of Margaret Somerville's  Body/Landscape Journals.
Why Salo is Banned in Australia
Authors: Magee Paul
Published: November 2014

A poem by Paul Magee.
Untying the Old School
Authors: Norman Sarah-Jane
Published: November 2014

The author's account of revisiting her old school.
Walking from the Car
Authors: Redshaw Sarah
Published: November 2014

A review of Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift, and John Urry (eds), Automobilities (Sage, London, 2005).
Slight Anthropologies
Authors: Fletcher Gabrielle Lorraine
Published: November 2014

A piece of writing that links the impact of colonialism to the lives of contemporary Indigenous peoples, particularly through a focus on the sexual abuse of women, through the histories of two similar women.
Taking Them Back: Archival Media in Arnhem Land Today
Authors: Thomas Martin
Published: November 2014

This article explores the significance of footage of the sacred ceremonies of indigenous people in 1948 filmed by the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land in Australia's Northern Territory. The author shows a group of scientifically-minded Westerners drawn into secret Aboriginal rituals and argues that the archives open new possibilities for preserving an endangered body of knowledge.
Unaustralia: Strangeness and Value
Authors: Frow John
Published: November 2014

This essay explores the flawed legal regime governing national security in Australia. It focuses on legislation related to anti-terrorism and discusses the negative effects of the bills, particularly in relation to the treatment of refugees and asylum seekers. The author reflects on the harsh political and social climate of Australia during the era of the Howard government and One Nation party, noting that democratic and the liberal values can be in conflict.
Trace Evidence: The Uncertainty of the Real
Authors: Morrissey Belinda , Davis Kristen
Published: November 2014

This article examines the impact of trace items through their evocation and elevation to the status of the sublime object. The authors focus on the impact that things left behind by the dead or missing have on those whose loved them, arguing that such traces provide a glimmer of materiality that those left behind can desperately crave.
Bringing Indigenous Religion into Focus
Authors: Maddox Marion
Published: November 2014

A review of Max Charlesworth, Francoise Dussart and Howard Morphy (eds), Aboriginal Religions in Australia: An Anthology of Recent Writings (Ashgate, London, 2005).
Mixed Feelings
Authors: Gibbs Anna
Published: November 2014

A review of Kay Milton and Maruska Svasek (eds), Mixed Emotions: Anthropological Studies of Feeling (Berg, Osford and New York, 2005).
Beyond Borders
Authors: Douglas Kate
Published: November 2014

A review of Bob Hodge and John O'Carroll, Borderwork in Multicultural Australia (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2006).
Introduction: A Fragmented Stew of ‘Themes’ and ‘Issues’
Authors: Forrest Tara
Published: November 2014

An introduction to the themes of the 'History Experiments' issue, and an overview of the articles.
Historical Fiction and the Allegorical Truth of Colonial Violence in The Proposition
Authors: Collins Felicity
Published: November 2014

Firing another shot in the history wars, Prime Minister Howard used his 2006 Australia Day speech to berate postmodern approaches to historical truth. At the same time, a UK-Australia co-production, The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005) was enjoying critical acclaim as both a violent revisionist Western and an important film about Australia’s frontier history. It would be tempting to include this frontier film in the cycle of ‘post Mabo’ films exemplified by The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002). Yet unlike The Tracker, The Proposition eschews historical reference in favour of baroque allegory. If The Tracker’s moral fable is clearly a left-liberal intervention in the history wars, The Proposition seems to offer no illumination of the present, only the unredeemed violence of retribution as the irrefutable truth of the frontier, aligning it with the 1976 mini-series, Luke’s Kingdom. This article asks in what sense history persists in the allegorical truth of frontier films which cannot be subsumed into historical representation. I argue that The Proposition offers a philosophical view of history as mediated time, rather than a political view of history as traumatic event. I contrast the popular reception of The Proposition as a revisionist, bushranger Western ‘about’ Australian history, with Routt’s counter-claim that The Proposition is an art film ‘about’ violence, revealing Australia as ‘a primal scene of annihilation.’ However, in order not to reinstate the myth of a fatal landscape as the template of Australian identity, I turn to Benjamin’s critique of Baroque allegory as a retrospective mode in which the transience of time finds expression in decay, ruin and debris. The question to be resolved is whether, by giving us multiple horizons of historical time, the revisionist film avoids being drawn into allegory’s melancholy alliance with myth, opening instead into a cinematic revelation of history’s unrealised potential.
The Challenge of Film Considered as Historical Research
Authors: Berg Olaf
Published: November 2014

The article focuses on the use of film as a medium of historical research. It discusses the film "Shoah," directed by Claude Lanzmann, which is considered as a model for filmic history. It also looks into Robert Rosenstone's claim that people may consider filmmakers as historians and that people should derive theory from practice through analyzing how the past has been portrayed in films.
‘There was Nothing to Say and Nobody Said It’: Silence, Disconnection and Interruptions of Gertrude Stein’s Writing Voice during World War II
Authors: Walker Ruth
Published: November 2014

The article focuses on the experiences of Gertrude Stein in France during World War II that is portrayed in her book "Wars I Have Seen." The book depicts a picture of her and her partner Alice B. Toklas as well as an emphasis on media technologies. The book reveals that Stein has been preoccupied during the war with disconnected telephones and addictive radio. It also discusses the impact of acoustic communication technologies on war writing.
Introduction: Cultures of Panic
Authors: Davies Cristyn , Payne Robert
Published: November 2014

The editors of the 'Panic' section of this issue give an overview of panic theory and introduce the articles in the issue.
‘New Ways to Frame the Mammoth Horror’: Media First Responders and the Katrina Event
Authors: Knox Sara
Published: November 2014

This article explores the state of emergency following Hurrican Katrina or ‘the Katrina Event’ with reference to the role of media first responders. Throughout the ensuing disaster the performance of the media (including celebrity advocates like Oprah Winfrey, Geraldo Rivera and Kanye West) worked as a mechanism for technical remastery in the face of systemic breakdown. This re-mediation of panic and of the state of emergency shifted attention from the local (that is, from the acts of witness by Katrina’s victims) to national reactions (as figured by advocates of the cause of the neglected poor of New Orleans). In this way even as voice was given to the failure of the nation to rise to the needs of its most vulnerable citizens, the figure of the nation as carer was re-instantiated in the televised outrage and frustration of talk show hosts, news anchors, and charity fund-raising celebrities.
Beyond Savagery: The Limits of Australian ‘Aboriginalism’
Authors: Anderson Kay , Perrin Colin
Published: November 2014

Ideas and representations of the supposedly savage condition of the New World's indigenous peoples have informed a now familiar account of colonialism. These have been understood as the ‘constructions’ of a discourse concerned to justify its colonisation of indigenous lands, and to legitimate its dispossession of indigenous peoples. There is no doubt that racial stereotypes were invoked to support colonialism. But their instrumentalisation—as self-serving constructions of ‘otherness’—has not only tended to define the colonial ‘encounter’ as a unilateral exercise of power; in so doing, it has effaced its very character as an encounter. In this paper, we critically engage this account of colonial discourse in its application to the Australian colonial context. Drawing less upon Edward Said’s description of the power of discourse, and more upon Homi Bhabha’s attempt to elicit its limits, our aim here is to restore to the Australian colonial encounter something of its specificity as an encounter. For this encounter, we argue here, provides a salient—if not a crucial—instance of the failure of colonial discourse to ‘construct’ Aboriginal peoples as savages.
(Re)visiting the Corporate World: The Matrix Evolution
Authors: Michael Rose
Published: November 2014

This article is a reflection on the author’s personal experience undertaking a corporate secondment to the remote Aboriginal community of Aurukun in 2001–02, working on the Family Income Management Scheme. She analyses the history, context and possible motivations of such programs, and considers how likely they are to halt the severe social dysfunction currently manifest. Her discussion focuses on the role of individual ‘blow-ins’ in light of her own experience and explores some of the ways in which change might be achieved—within employees such as herself, at least.
Kitsch Politics
Authors: Frow John
Published: November 2014

A review of Marita Sturken, Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Duke University, Durham, 2007).
The Resignation of the Governor-General: Family Drama and National Reproduction
Authors: Baird Barbara
Published: November 2014

This article tells the story of the 2003 resignation of Peter Hollingworth as Governor-General as part of an ongoing hyper-anxiety in Australia about the state and status of ‘the child’. The sexually abused child sits at the centre of this story and carries a heavy burden with respect to the past and future of the white Australian nation. The recuperation of that child to a state of innocence, repeatedly, as stories of its abuse keep returning to our front pages and political agendas, is necessary for the reproduction of the white nation. This article shows that the Hollingworth drama is entwined with the current politics of motherhood and fatherhood and the carriage of national feeling and temporality through the performances of these always racialised identities. Attending to the politics of the historical construction of the child, and the idealised parents who abuse or protect it (but never allow this child a voice or a sexuality of her or his own), thus becomes a part of the project of accountability to the past which has also occupied public life in Australia over recent years.
Imagining the Good Indigenous Citizen: Race War and the Pathology of Patriarchal White Sovereignty
Authors: Moreton-Robinson Aileen
Published: November 2014

In June 2007, the Australian federal government sent military and policy into Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory on the premise that sexual abuse of children was rampant and a national crisis. This article draws on Foucault’s work on sovereignty and rights to argue that patriarchal white sovereignty as a regime of power deploys a discourse of pathology in the exercising of sovereign right to subjugate and discipline Indigenous people as good citizens.
Native American Scholarship and the Transnational Turn
Authors: Warrior Robert
Published: November 2014

The term transnational has had a strong impact in various corners of literary and cultural studies over the past decade, but is only now emerging as a significant category of analysis among Native American writers and critics and in Native American Studies. This essay grew out of a specific attempt to make some sense of why so many Native scholars in literary studies have steered clear of discourse on the transnational. It aims to provide a deeper understanding of how criticism fits into larger constellations of ethnic studies, politics, and culture.
The Far-Away Within Us: Philosophies of Love and Death
Authors: Kirkby Joan
Published: November 2014

A review of Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally:  The Last Interview:  An Interview with Jean Birnbaum (Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2007) and Linnell Secomb, Philosophy and Love:  From Plato to Popular Culture ( Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2007).
Un-containable Affects: Disability and the Edge of Aesthetics
Authors: Hickey-Moody Anna
Published: November 2014

A review of Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (Columbia University Press, New York, 2007).
Heroes, Mates and Family: How Tragedy Teaches Us About Being Australian
Authors: Gillman Sarah
Published: November 2014

In his 2006 Australia Day address to the National Press Club in Canberra, the then prime minister, John Howard, told journalists that ‘people come to this country because they want to be Australians’. However, as Howard himself admitted, ‘The irony is that no institution or code lays down a test of Australianness’. So how can we know what it is to be Australian? One way is to look at the public statements the Howard made in the wake of tragedy and disaster during his decade as prime minister. These statements reinforce the key values of the Howard government: the role of family, the place of heroes and the importance of mateship. This article analyses the public reaction of the Howard during media coverage of events such as the Port Arthur shootings, the Bali bombings, the 2004 tsunami and the Beaconsfield mine rescue. It argues that Howard’s public responses to these tragedies reflect a move on hi part to recapture the cultural debate and define what it is to be an ‘Australian’.
Gendering Aboriginalism: A Performative Gaze on Indigenous Australian Women
Authors: Barney Katelyn
Published: November 2014

One of the most common Aboriginalist representations of Indigenous Australian people is, as Indigenous female performer Lou Bennett points out, ‘basically a man, out in the desert, black skin, flat nose with a lap-lap on, standing on one leg, resting against a spear’. Her comment raises many issues. In what ways are discourses of Aboriginalism gendered? How does Aboriginalism affect performance and specifically Aboriginal women performers? In exploring these questions, I examine Aboriginalist representations of Aboriginal women performers by white male scholars and the role of women anthropologists in the production of Aboriginalist discourse about Aboriginal women. Drawing on interviews with Indigenous women performers and musical examples of their songs, I explore the impact of Aboriginalism on non-Indigenous expectations of Indigenous Australian women performing in contemporary music contexts, the strategies performers use to work within and against these constructions and my own relationship to Aboriginalism.
Introduction: Doing Rural Cultural Studies
Authors: Evers Clifton , Gorman-Murray Andrew , Potter Emily
Published: November 2014

The guest editors of the Rural Cultural Studies section introduce the articles.
The Ethics of Rural Place-Making: Public Space, Poetics, and the Ontologies of Design
Authors: Potter Emily
Published: November 2014

The small settlement of Hopetoun in the Victoria’s north-east – Mallee country – is oriented physically, economically and socially around Lake Laschelle. Large signs map the way for the tourist to its edge, where boat ramps and picnic sites await. And yet there is no water here and has been none for years. The presence of water in its absence is palpable. Over three years I followed water around the drought-ridden Mallee, a participant in a creative research project that sought to poetically recollect and assemble stories from this country as an experiment in place-making. Via collaborative practice between artists, with local community, and with the material environment of the Mallee itself, this still ongoing project brings poetic practice to bear on questions of political urgency – drought, climate change, community distress – usually the province of the techno and social sciences. In a land cultivated to take note of water’s absence, the project began to assemble its presence. This paper discusses this project as a methodological experiment that raises unsettling questions about the ethics of place-making in a context of post-colonial environmental change.
Who Do I Serve?
Authors: Slater Lisa
Published: November 2014

A  few  years  ago  I  was  recalling  fieldwork  anxieties  to  a  colleague.  His  response  was to  ask,  ‘who  do  you  serve?’  The  question  threw  me:  I  wanted  to  say,  ‘No  one,  I’m  Australian’.  A  simple  provocation  and  I  become  a  wild  colonial  girl.  We  had  attended  a  conference  in  Delhi  together  and  it  got  him  reminiscing  about  his  time  as  a  student  in  India:  he  spent  a  few  years  studying  and  travelling,  accumulating  friends, stories,  bits  and  pieces  of  learning  and  love  and  devotion  to  the  country.  From memory,  the conversation  took  place  after  we’d  returned  to  Melbourne.  We  were having  one  of  those  nurturing  collegial  conversations:  someone  keeping  me  company  as  I  gently  worried  away  at  the  ethical  conundrums  of  cultural  research. He  told  me  that  from  his  long,  indolent  time  spent  meandering  around  India  it  is  the  question  from  a  student  friend  that  returned  to  him  most  readily,  keeping  him  in  check.  His  friend  asked  matter‐a‐factly,  ‘who  do  you  serve?’  It  was  intended  as  a  straightforward  question,  assumed  to  have  a  ready  answer:  not  designed  to  illicit  consternation,  anger  and  certainly  not  existential  angst.  He  couldn’t  answer.  But  he  said  now  he  regularly  reflects  upon  it.  The  answer  had  become  his  navigational  star.
Up Close and Personal, But Not Close Enough: Review of Samantha Holland (ed.), Remote Relationships in a Small World
Authors: Cefai Sarah
Published: November 2014

One  of  the  central  aims  of  this  book  is  to  establish  life  online  as  a  legitimate  and  sociologically  significant  area  of  study.  To  this  end  the  book  provides  a  genuinely  wide  range  of  original  essays,  each  of  which  focuses  on  a  discretely  defined  empirical  site.  The  collection’s  empiricism  is  impressively  buttressed  by  well‐located  literature  reviews and  the  provision  of  detailed  notes  on  methodology. This  makes  for  an  excellent  teaching  resource,  as  an  introduction  to  the  field  and  a  ‘how  to’ guide  for  those  unfamiliar  with  the passages  of  qualitative  research.  It  is  also  a  useful  research  tool  for  those wanting  to  survey  the  field  and  access  an  up‐to‐date  bibliography.
War and Its Other: Review of Nick Mansfield's Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou
Authors: Vardoulakis Dimitris
Published: November 2014

In  this  ambitious,  erudite  and  at  the  same  time  impassioned  book  on  conceptualisations  of  war  since  the  seventeenth  century,  Nick  Mansfield  starts  from  the  premise  that  war  can  only  be  thought  in  relation  to  its  other.  This  other  can  assume  different  guises,  such  as  peace,  the  social,  sovereignty  and  so on.  Mansfield  persuasively  argues  that  only  a  ‘humanist  sentimentality’  would  see  war’s  other  as  unquestionably  good.  (165)  Such naivete  forgets  that  wars  have  always  been  fought  and  crimes  have  always  been  perpetrated  in  the  name  of  a  purported  defence  of  humanity,  even  of  life itself.  ‘Peace  might  be  the  most  aggressive  thing  of  all.’  (114)
Ghost Stories: Review of Ross Gibson's The Summer Exercises
Authors: Williams Deane
Published: November 2014

Back  in  1986,  Ross  Gibson  was  interviewed  in  Filmnews  by  Adrian  Martin  and Tina  Kaufman  about  his  experimental  short  essay  film  Camera  Natura  (1984). Accompanying  that  interview  was  a  photo  of  Gibson  ‘on  location’  for  his  film,  wearing  a  hat  not  unlike  the  one  that  features  on  the  cover  of  his  new  book  The  Summer  Exercises.  Back  then  I  understood  the  hat  to  be  an explorer’s,  someone  like  Charles  Sturt,  someone  whose  willingness  to  learn  from  his  environment  had  impressed  Gibson  in  fashioning  his  own  history  of  Australian  landscape  imaging.  Now  the  hat  looks  like  a  detective’s  or,  rather,  Marcel  Duchamp’s  rendering  of  a  detective’s  hat:  on  display,  ready  for  our  re‐consideration.
Editorial
Authors: Frow John , Schlunke Katrina
Published: November 2014

Editorial by John Frow and Katrina Schlunke.
Fragments Shored against Ruins: Denis Byrne’s Surface Collection
Authors: Gillen Paul
Published: November 2014

Denis Byrne’s Surface Collection is a finely written philosophical travelogue, taking the reader on an archaeological tour of South Asia that is also a personal quest and a critique of heritage conservation. Its closely organised structure, reminiscent of baroque music, begins with an investigation of the modes of erasure or preservation of the recent past in South East Asia, shifts to an ironic narrative of futile quests for historical traces, and concludes with reflections on the clash of popular Buddhist relic worship with the values of heritage conservation. Byrne stages the latter conflict as between magical and rationalistic worldviews. Mildly dissenting, this essay suggests that although heritage conservation deploys scientific meanss, it is based on the sacralisation of the past. This motivation brings it closer to magic than to core tenets of Enlightenment, either of the Rational or the Buddhist kind.
The Somerton Man: An Unsolved History
Authors: Balint Ruth
Published: November 2014

The case of the unknown man who died mysteriously at Somerton Beach in South Australia in 1948 remains an open police investigation, although the trail today has grown fairly cold. Revisiting the case, and the responses the mystery of his person have elicited, enables a special historical insight into Australia’s postwar society, and the ways in which the past is continually reshaped by the subjectivities of the present. Further, an unsolved case such as this provides for a unique kind of historical project. The limitations of a history without a coherent centre are myriad, yet so are the possibilities.  In this article, I explore the possibilities of an ‘unsolved history’, a history of dead ends, and argue that it is the very unknowable-ness of the Somerton Man that allows for a perception of history as multi-dimensional and complex.
Churned and Spurned in the Flexible World of Work: A Corporate Narrative
Authors: Messer Jane
Published: November 2014

Accelerated by the new internet technologies, the past two decades have been characterised by a globalisation of trade and communications, along with major shifts in the balance between manufacturing and knowledge driven economies. New organisational cultures have grown out of and have reflexively driven these changes, and these new organisational cultures of work are registered and enacted by employees through a plethora of micro-practices in the workplace. While it is potentially empowering to be aware of the links between one’s individual agency and the macro structure surrounding your own particular micro-experience, awareness is particularly hard to come by in the modern flexible workplace. Narrative can address this gap in felt knowledge, because in helping us have an imaginary about our experience as workers, narrative supports thinking more broadly about the contradictions inherent in the current system of globalised profit and productivity through flexible labour paradigm. Sociologist Richard Sennett and psychoanalyst Christophe Dejours’s work on character and subjectivity are used here to frame the author’s ethnographic research, which has included a series of extended interviews with IT executive salespeople in Sydney and brief workplace immersions, leading to a series of narratives of character; analysis of ‘The IBM Global Human Capital Study 2008’; and excerpts from J.M. Coetzee’s memoir Youth.
Anthropology: A Science of the Non-event?
Authors: Morgan Hamish
Published: November 2014

This essay explores the notion of the ‘event’ and it relevance to ethnography and community. It has developed from research work with Aboriginal people, especially the Jackman family, in central Western Australia. The essay sketches the possibility of developing another kind of ethnographic writing, one attuned to the relation with others, one that involves being-in-common with others. It focuses on developing a writing practice that is exposed to interruption, to fragments, to little happenings and encounters, to those shared events that happen in community. The essay sees community as the place of interruption: that to be with others is to be taken off, shown something else, exposed to unique turnings of the world that others give light to trace.
Ruminations on Time (2005–2009)
Authors: Tatman Lucy
Published: November 2014

Because the apocalypse did not occur, but the time of linear progress did come to a crashing halt. Because the post-modern rumours of utter temporal fragmentation seem quite silly. Because although we are very good at wearing watches, are positively wedded to our diaries, even so we seem to be suffering from a peculiar kind of temporal drift. Hhhmmm. If each era is both burdened and held loosely together by one temporal modality that figures most strongly in the cultural imagination, what happens when that temporality collapses?
Plastic Surgery for the Monadology: Leibniz via Heidegger
Authors: Harman Graham
Published: November 2014

The article discusses fascinating points of similarity and difference between Leibniz's Monadology and Heidegger's 'The Thing', two of the greatest short works in the history of philosophy. But the key point of intersection between them is not widely recognised: indirect causation.
Cultural Studies and Matters of Faith: The Case of DhammaWheel.com
Authors: Ng Edwin
Published: November 2014

This article begins with the premise that cultural studies has neglected questions about religion and faith. Through an analysis of a discussion in an online Buddhist forum whereby the participants debate the issue of faith vis-a-vis knowledge, the paper explicates how Buddhism negotiates dominant cultural formations and evolves against various contexts of social struggles. The analysis also reveals how the participants articulate a vernacular theory of faith to rethink the relationships between reason, religion, faith, knowledge, and ethics. The article demonstrates how an engagement with a religious discourse elucidates themes that are of interest to cultural studies’ critical project, and argues that cultural studies has an ethical responsibility to engage with religion and address matters of faith.
In Threads and Tatters: Costume, Identification and Female Subjectivity in Mulholland Dr.
Authors: Chapple Lynda
Published: November 2014

This arrticle  explores the instability and trauma implicit in the representation of the female image in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), and more especially the ways in which this links to the clothing worn by the two female protagonists.  By examining the role of mourning and nostalgia, the figure of the amnesiac, the complex pairing, doubling and splitting of the characters of the two female leads, and the relationship of these to identification, it will argue that the costuming practices in this film exemplify a crisis of identification within a specifically feminine cinematic image. The costumes represent an approximation of self; they work as devices that desperately attempt to secure some form of identity, doubling and mirroring the self in a vain, ultimately failed, attempt to fix the female subject and resolve her ontological ambiguity. Within a cinematic context, such a failure represents the breakdown of a central and defining paradigm and raises questions concerning the stability of concepts such as subjectivity and identification.
Death and Digital Photography
Authors: Ennis Helen
Published: November 2014

This essay considers new possibilities for photographing the dying and dead in Australia that have been enabled by digital technologies. It argues that vernacular digital photographs demonstrate unprecedented degrees of control and privacy and further that they are purposefully withheld from public view, thus raising issues about visibility and secrecy. Some historical context is provided. Post mortem photographs were not uncommon in the nineteenth century but were in the domain of professional studio photographers. Commissioning post mortem portraits was rare for most of the twentieth century, due to changing attitudes to death and the transformation of the photographic industry. Photographing the deceased re-emerged in the 1980s, notably in the area of neonatal death. In the last five years death-related vernacular photographs have begun to proliferate. Unlike analogue processes, digital photography bypasses the involvement of others in processing and printing private images. Distribution to intimates can be achieved instantaneously via the internet, reinforcing social and familial connections. Vernacular digital photographs of the deceased do not address historical tradition but share their domestic and intimate contexts. Nor do they belong to a unified group, yet they have a common vocabulary which emphasises specificity and detail.
Dying for Security
Authors: Buchan Bruce
Published: November 2014

If political statements and media coverage are any guide, it seems Australians today are dying for security. At no other moment in our history has the spectre of war and terrorism so haunted popular, political and scholarly perceptions of Australia’s colonial past and of its geopolitical future. And yet, debates over colonial war or genocide and contemporary terrorism have been conducted in more or less complete isolation. In this article I argue that our contemporary obsession with ‘security’ is premised on the perennial threat of ‘insecurity’. This is the problem of in/security, and it has played a central role in the development of Western political thought. More importantly, its formulation in Western political thought provided a powerful justification for the violence of the early decades of Australia’s colonisation during which Indigenous Australians could also be said to have been dying for security.
A Jurisprudence of Ambivalence: Three Legal Fictions Concerning Death and Dying
Authors: Savell Kristin
Published: November 2014

Through a critical reading of the English decision Ms B v An NHS Hospital Trust, and the more recent Australian decision, Brightwater Care Group (Inc) v Rossiter, this article examines three fictions that have been crucial in protecting the choice to die in the context of treatment withdrawal whilst maintaining a prohibition on assisting individuals who wish to die. These are: (i) a competent patient can refuse medical treatment for any or no reason, even if it means they will die; (ii) the doctor’s removal of life-supporting technology does not entail responsibility for the resulting death; and (iii) such deaths are natural deaths. The argument developed here is that when patients and doctors disagree about whether and how death should occur in the treatment withdrawal context, the conceptual space created by law to distance these deaths from culpable deaths is threatened. It is in these moments of dispute that the fictions are challenged, their fragility exposed, and law’s underlying ambivalence about the choice to die revealed.
Death and Grief in the Landscape: Private Memorials in Public Space
Authors: Gibson Margaret
Published: November 2014

This article discusses private, informal memorialisation practices that mark scenes and sites of death in public spaces and places. It focuses on changing practices of public visibilities of death and grief – practices that render visible in a semiotic way what would otherwise be invisible or relatively unknown occurrences of death. It argues that roadside memorials and other types of informal public memorials bring to consciousness and signification spaces and places that might otherwise be perceived as death neutral or untouched by death.
Aural Understanding
Authors: Duffy Michelle
Published: November 2014

A review of John Paul Lederach and Angela Jill Lederach, When Blood and Bones Cry Out: Journeys through the Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation.
Boys Boys Boys: Gender, Race and the English Music Question
Authors: Laurie Timothy
Published: November 2014

A review of Laurie Stras (ed.), She’s So Fine: Reflections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music and Andy Bennett and Jon Stratton (eds), Britpop and the English Music Tradition.
Wiring the Wireless: Networking Early US Radio Broadcasting
Authors: O'Donnell Vincent
Published: November 2014

A review of Alexander Russo, Points on the Dial.
Making Students Think More Critically
Authors: Van Den Cruyce Nele
Published: November 2014

A review of Barry Brummet, Rhetoric in Popular Culture (third edition).
At the Table with Hungry Ghosts: Intimate Borderwork in Mexico City
Authors: Duruz Jean
Published: November 2014

This article focuses on the project of sustaining cultural diversity within global cities’ intimate spaces. Specifically, it sketches the culinary histories of an Anglo-Australian woman (who, in 1968, settled permanently in Mexico) and her male partner (who grew up in Mexico; his mother Mexican, his father Cantonese). Drawing on the tools of ‘borderwork’ (Hodge and O’Carroll), the argument positions culturally diverse landscapes of ‘Sydney’, ‘China’ and ‘Mexico City’ as distinct yet overlapping geographies. Meanwhile, analysis of curious moments in the couple’s intersecting histories contributes much fluidity to this cartography. In the process, a company of hungry ghosts appears at the dinner table – ghosts of diversity, diaspora and cosmopolitanism; nostalgia and memory; gender and ethnicity; home and belonging. The article concludes that even when borderwork is conducted amiably behind closed doors, it relies on contradictions for cultural sustenance. At the same time, its tensions resonate with possibilities for creative practice.
Critical Incident Analysis and the Semiosphere: The Curious Case of the Spitting Butterfly
Authors: Hodge Bob , Matthews Ingrid
Published: November 2014

In January 2007, media outlets across Australia reported the local court decision Police v Rose. Mr Rose pleaded guilty and the presiding magistrate recorded no conviction. This event sparked a ‘butterfly effect’ that culminated in legislative amendments changing the make-up of the body responsible for oversight of judges in New South Wales. Key players failed to observe the doctrine of the separation of powers; while others called for its observation.   None of this would have been foreseeable to Mr Rose or the two transit officers on the night he was detained. This paper uses complexity theory and digital media analysis to locate flashpoints around which critical incidents occur; and what the unexpected flow-on effects reveal about the host society.
Discursive Belonging: Surviving Narrative in Migrant Oral History
Authors: Trezise Bryoni
Published: November 2014

This article examines the performativity of textual remnants and oral histories in constituting the cultural identity of migrants in Australia, specifically the “non-British” New Australian migrant, circa 1950. It specifically analyses the rhetorical construction of New Australians in one oral history collection held within the State Library of New South Wales, to argue that migrants to Australia become caught within an impossible politics of discursive belonging. In this, the migrant must rely upon culturally acceptable narratives of survival in order to access representational visibility, at the same time as they attempt the survival of these normative narratives themselves. I use a performative writing methodology to restage the contingency of what can be understood as a national history of migrant identity in Australia.
Going Places: Praxis and Pedagogy in Australian Cultural Studies
Authors: Rey Rebecca , Nabizadeh Golnar
Published: November 2014

This article considers the pedagogical value of praxis in maintaining the relevance of cultural studies in the Australian academic environment. Following its highly politicised beginnings at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, we consider whether traditional classroom practices are commensurate with the contemporary expectations of students and staff. As a working model of the current Australian university climate, we consider the discipline group of English and Cultural Studies (ECS) at the University of Western Australia. After evaluating data gathered from interviews and surveys across the undergraduate, postgraduate and staff population, we suggest potential pedagogical innovations to be implemented in cultural studies at UWA, as a case study within Australia. Our findings show that students are calling for practical activities that would benefit their studies as a complement to theory in the classroom. As a result, we argue that praxis is not only important, but vital, in the teaching of cultural studies as an enabling activity that encourages the use of new teaching methods.
Peron's Cultural Influence
Authors: King Andrew
Published: November 2014

A review of Matthew Karush and Oscar Chamosa (eds), The New Cultural History of Peronism: Power and Identity in Mid-Twentieth Century Argentina (Duke, 2010).
Settlement
Authors: Frow John
Published: November 2014

The paper explores the idea of settlement in each of its three major senses: as a place of human habitation; as a fixed and stable order of habitation; and as a political consensus reconciling fractious groups. Arguing that traditional accounts of settlement depend, with a kind of pastoral nostalgia, upon a view of abstraction and social complexity as in themselves  harmful, it follows through the implications of the concept for ways of dealing with the stranger, and it uses a drawing by the nineteenth-century indigenous Australian artist Tommy McRae, done about 1890 and entitled Corroboree, or William Buckley and dancers from the Wathaurong people, to propose a counterfactual model through which a settlement with the stranger might be imagined.
The Shimmering Dam
Authors: Shipway Jesse Thomas
Published: November 2014

This piece is an attempt to understand physical structures intertextually and to map mental forms and biographical fragments onto architectural objects.It stands language games and postures of articulation next to one another to produce meaning through differentiation and creative negation.