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This article discusses the experiences of six artists participating in a new Australian creative accelerator programme for emerging media documentary. Attending to the processes, perspectives and frames employed by these artists in developing their early-stage projects, the article explores the diverse practice-based methods employed in developing documentary for emerging media formats. The paper argues for the value of attending to process and practice, as key frameworks that set the context for eventual creative outcomes. In doing so, the paper aims to contribute to knowledge about methods to support artists in developing emerging media documentary in a creative accelerator context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I reflect on the experience of the Australian summer bushfires of 2019/2020 and the different ways forms of media reporting amplified its affects. Across broadcast media, local response, social media and personal account, I chart alternate stories during and after the event-as-spectacle. Taking into account the socio-political climate, the climatic atmosphere and the ongoing anxiety after the fires, I consider the use of apocalyptic words alongside the repetitive pairing of affective images to question what these might reveal about ourselves. Through the lens of affect attention is drawn to the many interacting conditions and forces that coalesce and gather as attachments, ideas, or assumptions and how these might influence perceptions of the event and actions in the aftermath of fire threat. Woven into the paper is my personal writing alongside details drawn from select Instagram accounts recording the everyday labours of caring for a place during and after the fires. As a counter-narrative to obliteration and all things lost, these missives disclose a different understanding of the event, long after the news media has moved on. For the authors and followers alike, lessons are revealed through attention to the land and hope in the processes of everyday encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role that guilt plays in Australia's construction of its outsiders by focusing on contemporary migrant experience. I build upon Sarah Ahmed's work on the politics of emotion to read migrant interviews in relation to media: films, political speeches, and other discursive structures that facilitate social organization in Australia. In the first part of this paper, I argue that a 'multicultural narrative' positions the nation as a 'happy home,' and examine how this can displace feelings of guilt in the migrant by rendering possible social transgressions positive steps towards attaining a greater social good. In the second section of this paper, I discuss Australia's 'hatred narratives.' I do not define hatred as a necessarily aggressive emotion, but instead, demonstrate the way particular words can be affectively charged because of the histories they invoke, and show how this affect can be mobilized to create outsiders who are not welcome in the national imaginary and Australian society. These narratives however, are not fixed: political parties can appeal to tropes that have accumulated in affective value – such as the 'home' – in order to achieve different political goals, and to organize social groups by aligning individuals with or against affectively charged objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the prosecution of publisher William Whitehouse Collins due to pornography in New South Wales. Violations of the Obscene Publications Prevention Act of 1880; Political aspects of pornography; Argument on the scientific and philosophic side of the publications; Effort of the authorities to normalize sexual behavior.

In this paper, I utilize autographics as an autoethnographic methodology to illustrate the subjective experience of being a precariously employed migrant academic in Australia. The autographic narrative, as well as the traditional text, are in dialogue with Sara Ahmed's work on migration and estrangement, in order to explore migration both as a physical movement between countries, but also as a metaphorical movement between different forms of writing – scholarly texts and comics – and the communities associated with them – Academia and the Zine scene. Ahmed explores critical theory's celebration of migration as a metaphor for transgression, a symbolic act of abandoning the familiar, the traditional and safe patterns of thinking to embark on adventures across borders and boundaries. My own presumptions regarding a literal migration in physical space were conflated with this metaphorical meaning, as I saw it as a liberatory move to reflect on – and re-invent – myself, breaking away from a national identity which I found stifling. My actual experience of migration turned out to be one of dislocation and isolation. In order to escape feelings of anxiety, I sought refuge in another metaphor: academia, and later the zine scene as an alternative 'homeland.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural Studies' 'institutional presence' in higher education is well documented; however, less well understood are nuances between different institutional 'types' and the way that Cultural Studies is variously taught and practiced in these settings. This paper will explore the authors' experiences of teaching with Cultural Studies in Australian regional universities and the opportunities that Cultural Studies presents in these 'peripheral' locations. Arguing that predominant accounts of Cultural Studies' practice derive from institutional settings where a recognised disciplinary presence is evident, this paper will chart what it means to enact Cultural Studies in locations where the disciplinary presence is not so visible. We suggest that enactments of Cultural Studies in these settings demonstrate innovative activations of practice that afford generative possibility for the discipline. The ways that Cultural Studies comes to be done in these contexts provide useful prompts for considering the possibilities that Cultural Studies provokes pedagogically, as a contextually contingent intellectual project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the implementation of multicultural policies since the 1970s, anxiety over cultural and religious 'others' continue to challenge Australia's diversifying national identity. Problematic media representations of racial and religious minorities persist in Australia and continue to shape public perceptions and political discourses on issues of migration and intercultural relations. This paper examines how Muslims and Africans are contemporary scapegoats of Australian anxieties. These fears continue to be present in racialized rhetoric and attacks on Chinese Australians during the COVID-19 pandemic. Applying discourse analysis on two recent case studies as illustrative examples – the 2018 Bourke Street attack and the so-called 'African gangs' – this paper argues that despite substantial research and critique, mainstream media continue to rely on familiar and problematic tropes for framing racial and religious minorities that dehumanize them based on essentialized characteristics of crime, violence and anti-social behaviour. These characteristics tend to be exploited for political gain, with Muslims and Africans portrayed as a disruption to social cohesion and national security. A critique of the role of media and political discourses is presented, as they remain critical instruments in the pursuit of a new ethics of openness, respect and mutual understanding, which are fundamental to living well with difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world in 2020 presented Australia with a world on fire, in lock down, and in environmental ruin, with potentially unprecedented social dislocation, homelessness, unemployment and mental health issues. Four artists reaction was to collaborate in an attempt to make sense of the complex COVID-19 context that was unfolding in front of them. Their interdisciplinary collaboration resulted in the multimedia artwork: Contested Spaces. Two iterations of the artwork (2020 and 2021) were exhibited as the artists navigated the unfolding spaces inhabited as they learnt to live and cope under the strictures of COVID-19. The 2021 iteration, was part of a national arts and mental health focus consisting of exhibitions, talks and workshops at the National Art School in Sydney and ECU Galleries in Perth. Through Contested Spaces the artists explored the complexity of unique circumstances brought about by the pandemic. Working collaboratively across disciplinary boundaries, created a space in which alternate understandings manifested as a consequence of the situation. This paper argues that the ongoing narrative of COVID-19 needs to be examined and scrutinized, in reconsidering our constant perpetual present, one that contests ideas and art making processes, proffering interdisciplinarity methods as a productive means for critiquing everyday pandemic complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes up Howard's (1999) suggestion that sentimentality can be a lens on self-world relations. It focuses on human-bird relations in a Facebook site dedicated to Australian wild birds: Birds in Backyards (Australia). We argue that the traditional ideal of intellectual and affective distance through which critiques of sentimentality are still so often couched is not very useful in understanding and valuing the dynamic, interactive and immersive forms of social media. A study of Birds in Backyards suggests that there quite different ways that the love of wild birds can manifest and that sentimentality is not inimical to the generation of a community of care for, and celebration of, birds. Moreover, an older assumption that sentimentality might be the opposite of, or an impediment to, practical action seems hard to justify in the discursively and emotionally complex milieux of the digital age. Today, there is no place for an opposition between feeling and doing, and scientific action often requires and mobilizes emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research has been carried out on the discursive dehumanization of non-Anglo Celtic migrants to Australia – especially refugees and asylum seekers. However, this discourse also has an affective dimension that, in Sara Ahmed's terms, 'stick', impressing upon non-white migrants at a corporeal level. Depictions of self and Other in comic zines such as Where Do I Belong? by Silent Army, Villawood: Notes from a Detention Centre by Safdar Ahmed, and The Refugee Art Project's zine collection clearly demonstrate the ways in which the body is implicated in narratives about migration and asylum. This paper argues that the comic zine medium also allows for 'something else' to surface; namely, an excess with an interruptive rhythm. This excess is posited here as a type of 'diasporic intimacy'—a dystopic and unsuspecting affective force that disrupts the temporal and spatial rhythms of everyday life. By harnessing diasporic intimacies, the comic zines discussed here redeploy sticky and toxic discourses about migration and asylum, creating space for the migrant body to resist and reassemble. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the author's view about the issue concerning everyday transformations. He notes that the special issue papers collected in this issue of the journal proceed from the annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia held in Perth, Western Australia in December 2004. The papers in the issue are a combination of established voices in the field and emerging work. This grouping reveals the diverse approaches and applications of everyday life research as well as the broader approaches within cultural studies.

This paper argues that the internet is changing development, commissioning and production practices of Australian screen comedy. Due to ease of shareability, online comedy is traditionally of shorter length and cheaper than television to produce and is therefore attracting increased funding opportunities. The online environment offers new opportunities for emerging Australian comedy performers, creators and developers to produce screen comedy that resonates with audiences. A high online viewership may result in a greater share of subsequent funding and future commissioning into longer alternate formats, such as television. The desire for producing online comedy that is more likely to be shared is therefore impacting comedy production practice in Australia. By investigating several successful Australian online comedies, in terms of funding, content and viewership, the essay argues that the online platform allows the audience to influence the types of screen comedy being produced in Australia. The study examines how the Australian made online projects that are the most successful, in terms of funding and views, tend to be those that elicit laughter, shock, surprise and anger as these are the online projects most likely to be shared. This paper draws upon a larger study that relates to Australian narrative television comedy development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper argues that eating biscuits produces a small-scale war re-enactment with each bite. I focus on Anzac biscuits, which are sold at cafes, baked at home, nibbled at morning tea, and are a crucial fundraiser for veterans' organizations across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The biscuit's commemorative function starts with the Australia New Zealand Army Corps' participation in the Gallipoli campaign during World War I. Anzac biscuits connect contemporary eaters with food observed on the battlefield. Thinking Anzac biscuits together with war re-enactment complicates the biscuit's relations with national belonging, which rely on communitarian Christian frameworks that emphasize liturgy and communion. War re-enactment offers opportunities for slippage, transformation, and the possibility of changing history to change the present. Biscuits, including but not limited to Anzac biscuits, become political actors that counter conventional frameworks and invite new associations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking into consideration the November 2015 Australian Government Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs final report on violence towards people with disability in institutional and residential settings, this paper explores the framing and epistemology of torture as practised against people with disability in sites of incarceration. Examining Giorgio Agamben’s account of biopolitical sovereignty, this paper considers torture against people with disability as facilitated by legal exception. Extending this perspective further, and drawing on scholarship which examines anti-black violence in the context of policing and mass incarceration, it is argued that torture against people with disability constitutes an epistemic problem, where people with disability are framed as available for excessive violence without recourse to justice systems. This essay argues for more attention to the links between the torture experienced by people with disability in different sites of incarceration and systemic violence against racialized populations, particularly in the context of mass imprisonment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates Australia's National Security Information (Criminal and Civil Proceedings) Act 2004 (Cth) (NSI Act) focusing on its provisions for protecting national security information. The investigation highlights the broad and encompassing definitions of 'national security' and 'information' used in the Act and considers the measures it prescribes for the protection of so-called 'security sensitive' information in Federal civil and criminal proceedings. The paper then examines the implications of the definitions and measures for a suspect's prospects of receiving a fair trial in terrorism cases. Here, the paper highlights the serious restrictions the Act places on a legally-aided person's right to engage a legal representative of their own choosing. These restrictions are then compared with those obtaining in some comparable jurisdictions. As important as the NSI Act's definitions and measures are for the way in which they limit a terrorism suspect's chances of a fair trial, their significance extends well beyond this very serious issue to even deeper concerns. These relate to the secrecy and lack of transparency surrounding the conduct of terrorism cases, the opaqueness of the processes for classifying and protecting information, and the potential for tendentious or improper use of information by the political executive and national security agencies enabled by the dearth of avenues for external, independent scrutiny. At the core of these concerns, then, are issues of the accountability and integrity of the government and of the agencies under its direction. Using the experience of Mohamed Haneef as a case study, the final section of the paper investigates the important role that defence counsel, the media, and other independent parties can play in facilitating public scrutiny of the conduct of terrorism investigations and trials and in exposing the improper use sometimes made of protected information by the political executive in attempting to influence the conduct of these cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that the Australian government's intervention in the Northern pre-empts the end of Australia as a single nation state. Through a discussion of national identity, history and particular key (post 1965) policies/Acts and actions by the federal Government the paper considers the place of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in relation to the Australian nation-state and each other. The paper argues there has been a continued social and political marginalisation, displacement and exclusion of Indigenous Australians and continued construction of them as'others' to 'Australianness'. It argues that at so a pivotal point in the history of this country, in the Post Apology society, the Intervention is a watershed institutionalising racism towards indigenous Australians in the new millennium. It suggests place and identity within the 'Australian' nation-state need to be re-framed for the possibility for Indigenous inclusion and/or provide for the sovereignty of the Indigenous nations. Without such action it suggests the Howard/Rudd choirs sing to the ghost of the nation-state as he walks by the billabongs the wells of racism to which non-Indigenous leaders have ever returned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which different approaches to the idea of progress emerge alongside competing temporalities of sexual and gender diversity and belonging in the context of public debates and discussions on the Safe Schools Coalition review (February 2016). The public debates provided an important point-of-focus for understanding the contemporary setting of support for minorities in relation to cultural belonging and inclusivity in educational settings. The paper discusses the relationship between progress and temporality in its historical setting within Australian LGBTQ political history. We investigate three angles in which progress has been articulated in the Safe Schools debates: (1) disruptions to support as political setback to progress; (2) the view that safe support is necessary for the progress of LGBTQ ‘vulnerable’ youth within ‘developmental stages’; (c) the framing by conservative commentators that LGBTQ support curricula is a form of ‘progressive politics’ that undoes normative histories of neoliberal and conservative progress. Making use of the public debates around the Safe Schools curriculum to critique some of the ways in which progress on minority belonging for younger persons helps open the fields of meaning for alternative kinds of belonging that are produced through alternative cultural histories of marginalized subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing from a programme of applied research engaging with diverse groups of young people in an urban setting in Australia, this paper explores the peace building potential of facilitated storytelling. In this study ‘co-performative refugee storytelling’ involved scaling up narrative practices with the intention of creating city spaces that are more meaningfully inclusive of young people from refugee backgrounds. This model hinges on the theories of urban philosophers who emphasized the role of the imagination, and of cultural activity, in producing public space as a site of resistance. If space is produced relationally, and if cultural activity is an important medium for the production of relational space, then the role of artists and storytellers becomes a critical one in the creation of city spaces that are either welcoming or alienating. This discussion weaves strands of urban and cultural philosophy into a practical model for mobilizing collective storytelling to support a practice where a cosmopolitan imaginary can be publicly rehearsed. Ultimately, the function of this paper is to establish that if, as cultural practitioners, we understand that ‘co-performative refugee storytelling’ has the potential to produce relational spaces, then we may put this imaginary to use in practical ways. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The advent of ‘problem-solving courts’ (e.g. drug courts, mental health courts) is claimed by some to represent a significant shift in the administration of justice. Problem-solving courts purport to address the underlying social, medical and/or psychological issues that are often understood as driving certain populations’ contact with criminal justice systems. Although there is a large body of research examining the operation and efficacy of such courts, there is minimal critical research on how these courts have been conceptualized by governments as logical, suitable ‘solutions’ to both particular ‘problems’ in society and ‘problem populations’, and the various implications thereof. In this paper, we examine these issues through an adaptation of Australian post-structuralist theorist, Carol Bacchi’s theoretical framework. Bacchi argues that policy ‘problems’ do not precede policy interventions, but that ‘problems’ are instead constituted by and given meaning through implicit policy representations. In this paper we consider how two Australian problem-solving courts – Victoria’s Drug Court and the Assessment and Referral Court List for people with cognitive impairments or mental illness – have been conceptualized by Victoria’s Parliament to target their populations, the ‘problems’ they purport to address, and with what effects for targeted populations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper draws on Indigenous Australian relationships with water as evidenced in the particular cross-cultural and cross-literary collaboration ‘Sustainable Futures’1 between the Widjabul/Bundjalung Nations of New South Wales, Australia, and Lismore local government managed water authority, Rous Water. It also references the ecological dialogue with traditional owners put forward by Jessica Weir and the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (Victoria). In both cases non-Indigenes from economics and politics, socio-cultural geography as well as local activist citizens have been invited into dialogue, and into particular Indigenous knowledge systems, to co-create water management strategies for Australia's troubled river systems. The motivation behind such cross-cultural dialogue is hope for a meaningful future of sustainability in which human rights and notions of reverence are imbricated. The current water crisis, as articulated by Maude Barlow (Senior Advisor on Water to the President of The United Nations General Assembly), provides acute provocation for a radical re-thinking of approaches to water. This paper advances ‘other-wise’ notions of literacy, pedagogy, and epistemology to enable such re-thinking. The water crisis questions the legacy that a western lack of reverence for water, borne of narrow history making, means in current times. This inquiry is predicated on a critical need for understanding the greater properties and meanings of water beyond commodification frameworks, towards socio-cultural and spiritual knowledge and notions of reverence. To that end it locates water firstly as its ‘own self’, as part of a ‘sacred geography’ as Deborah Bird Rose suggests, and further as a pedagogical and geographical meeting place between different territories and ontologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years there has been a shift within Australian Universities to a corporate model of management rather than the collegial approach of the past. Concomitantly, Federal government funding mechanisms have required greater accountability for its financial investment in the sector's research activities. In turn, the daily life of an Australian scholar has undergone a significant transformation. In this current audit culture, academic staff are required to deal with the conflicting demands of onerous teaching commitments, emphasis on increased research production and the devolving of ever burgeoning administration to their own desktops. While University research communities were negotiating the requirements for the 2009–2010 Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) assessment, academic life proved particularly challenging for scholars whose work spans both traditional and non-traditional forms of research publication. This paper considers the implications of ERA for staff working in non-traditional research areas and the various negotiations they had to make between the requirements established by ERA and university administration and their own research inclinations. In particular, it focuses on the activities of the ‘champions’, those assigned the task of collecting and collating the information, the challenges they faced and the strategies they employed to deal with often conflicting impulses; on one hand the need to comply with reporting requirements and on the other, the reticence of their colleagues as well as their own misgivings. In so doing this paper reflects upon the tensions encompassing contemporary scholarly affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With reference to recent debates about the politics of representation, this paper argues that a profound ambivalence about identity, and particularly about Asian Australian identity, is a common characteristic of much recent Asian Australian literary writing. It also asks whether this is the characteristic that marks this writing as specifically Australian. Tracing cultural contexts from the 'pathologies' of Australian multicultural debates to other transnational literary traditions, the paper uses examples from the writing of Brian Castro, Alice Pung, Ouyang Yu, Nam Le, Shaun Tan, and Tom Cho to speculate on the emergence of a new and distinct phase of transnational writing in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a study of Diaspora's engagement with the media, especially that of 'conflict-generated Diasporas' is imperative to understand the dynamics of the conflict in the homeland in order to devise ways and means for conflict resolution. In the light of arguments that Diasporas often contribute to the prolonging and sustenance of a conflict, the paper takes up the example of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Australia and makes a case for exploring the members' engagement with media, particularly online media, to understand the dynamics and the trajectory of the conflict. This is significant, firstly, in the context of the Sri Lankan Diaspora's role in the two-decade-long civil strife in Sri Lanka that is currently poised to enter another phase,1 and secondly in the context of websites having been and continuing to be one of the most sought after sources of information on the Sri Lankan Tamil issue. The paper argues that the study of the reception of information on Tamil Eelam online by members of the Diaspora is imperative for an understanding of the 'reconfiguration and remaking' of Tamil Eelam. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed at a conference on cross cultural studies in Australia is presented. The topics are focused on cultural practice and modes of criticisms. The presenters include Melissa Gregg, Jean Burgess and Kris Cohen. The studies presented include blogging, computer hacking and online journalism.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Postfeminist media culture – or ‘internet feminism’ – readily enabled widespread feminist celebration of Julia Gillard’s empowerment, defence of her rights to equality and critique of the sexism that dogged her. However, this paper examines such public feminist commentary for the ways in which it sidelined women’s studies scholarship on the possible contributions of women’s ‘difference’ to public life. This marginalization was in keeping with the culture of postmaternalism described by Julie Stephens, which entails a widespread disavowal of the maternal and themes of care or sociality, including within feminism. Nevertheless, consistent recourse to the word ‘disappointing’ to describe Gillard’s performance – particularly by those on the left of the political spectrum – suggested a submerged desire for Gillard to do leadership differently, and with more ‘care’. In the absence of a robust and recognizable vocabulary for publicly articulating the links between care, sociality, women and politics – a vocabulary which might conceivably have provided Gillard with a more supportive script to follow – the prevailing feminist commentary struggled to diagnose and enunciate the systemic issues that constrained her ability to alter the political culture in which she was embedded. Ultimately, this paper argues that a significant task for public feminism is to disseminate the language and logic that will enable subsequent women in politics to claim greater authority and expertise with regard to the performance and provision of sociality and care. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent editions ofAustralian Humanities Review(2008) andCultural Studies Review(2010) mapped an emerging field of cultural studies devoted to rural Australia, uncovering the ways metropolitan biases tended to underpin studies of rural change. This paper builds upon that work by canvassing the mediation of meaning and interests that can occur when doing cultural studies in a wildly non-urban place. It draws on a new study of the lived experience of cyclone in Far North Queensland, where the people are allegedly ‘bred tough’ – and where the researcher grew up. While producing an oral-historical account that centres upon the voices of ‘survivors’, the project also reinterprets ‘cyclone’ as a cultural site, where stories of survival, both symbolic and literal, intersect. In that context, this paper examines the tensions involved in critiquing discursive and material histories and realities through embedded rural research practice, here depicted as a dialogic interchange with place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I examine Nazeem Hussain's SBS comedy series Legally Brown (2013–2014) to show how the series used humour to challenge the centring of white emotion and national belonging in Australian television. Drawing on Ghassan Hage's theorization of 'governmental belonging' and Sara Ahmed's work on affect, as well as scholarship on race and humour, I analyse how the series deployed a shifting mode of address to interpellate POC viewers and to speak to, about, and over whiteness. I argue that, by refusing to centre white emotion, and by exposing links between historical and present, and structural and 'everyday', racism in Australia, the series engaged critically with settler colonialism as an ongoing structuring logic of white 'governmental belonging'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper grapples with contestations about the place of dogs in Australian urban public space. On the one hand, urban Australia is characterized by high levels of dog ownership and intense family-style human–dog relations, yet, on the other, in public space dogs and their humans are subject to strict regulation and a regime of spatial segregation. Increased urban surveillance, privatization and control, coupled with regulation based on the figure of the dog-as-problem, have intensified disputation over the place of dogs in the city. Birke, Bryld, and Lykke (2004) suggest the notion of ‘animaling’ as a tactic for shifting perspective from animal essences – dangerous dogs and dog breeds, for example – towards a study of the material-semiotic performativity of human/animal relationships. This paper takes up this notion to explore the multiple ways in which dogs, humans and various human–dog conjunctions and relations ‘animal’ the city and shape public space. As a transgressive queer(y)ing of the border work that constitutes the human/animal dualism, ‘animaling’ is also useful for thinking about the affinities, partial connections and agencies that co-constitute human–dog relations and urban spatialities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Issue 17:4 marks a very real achievement in the unfolding history of Continuum, as it is the first time we have published four issues of the journal in an annual volume. In the past decade we have moved from two (often irregular) issues per volume, to three issues to four per volume in our current format. This has happened because of a number of dedicated people who continue to work with passion and commitment. Not least of these are the reviewers who must groan whenever they see another e-mail from one of the editors asking for a small favour. It is the tolerance and goodwill of our reviewers (many of whom still remain friends) that allow us to publish such high-quality papers. It is our intention to publish all the names of reviewers in issue 4 of each volume. It is our way of acknowledging their contribution and to say thank you. This issue also extends our association with the Cultural Studies Association of Australia with the publication of a selection of papers from the 2002 annual conference, 'Ute Culture--the Utility of Culture and the Uses of Cultural Studies", in Melbourne. The collection is edited by Brett Farmer, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue. We leave it to them to comment on the papers, but must at this point acknowledge their hard work and dedication in putting the issue together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the relative importance of parents and peers in supporting Australian children's use of the internet and whether those choices for support change with age and gender. The paper reports findings fromAU Kids Online, a satellite study toEU Kids Online. Parents were found to be the primary support to Australian children using the internet, with peer support increasingly important as children get older. The potential of these two key socializing influences to minimize harm and build resilience is considered in the light of other studies on Australian family internet use. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper employs a visceral approach to explore the affective relations between kangaroo meat and home. We concentrate on eating kangaroo as a central political issue. In 2008, kangaroo meat gained prominence in Australia through the proposal in theGarnaut Climate Change Reviewto reduce carbon emissions by changing consumers' red meat diets in an expanded kangaroo meat market. This paper considers why many Australian households choose to avoid eating kangaroo despite market relations and climate policy constituting ‘roo-consumers as ‘environmental citizens’. We draw on taste-driven fieldwork that involved participants plating up kangaroo meat at home. We focus on two participants who never eat kangaroo at home to illustrate how this visceral approach is useful to rethinking climate change policies. We discuss how the intensity of visceral disgust works against incorporating more kangaroo meat into weekly home diets to help mitigate climate change. Eating kangaroo created a domestic space where these participants felt viscerally disconnected with culinary legacies along with particular dimensions of their subjectivities and home. Rather than eating kangaroo being tied to the logic of climate change or capitalism, visceral disgust ruptures boundaries that maintain a socio-spatial political order to things through chicken, beef, lamb and pork. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Editorial. Introduces a series of articles published in the June 2003 issue of 'Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.' Cultural significance of television Logie Awards; Transition of the flaneur from modernity to postmodernity period; Analysis of Michael Powell's motion picture 'They're a Weird Mob.'

Following current literature on public and mobile screens, this paper discuses the relevance that screens have in our everyday lives by focusing on the combination of mobile and temporary screen-based practices in the digital mediation of a single public commemorative event. We present an ethnographic account of different screen practices at the Anzac Day dawn Service, an annual Australian commemorative ceremony on a public holiday, 25 April. By focusing our analysis in a single place for a limited time, we analyse how people relate to screens in different ways, from media reception to spatial organization to online connection. We suggest that screens form a fundamental element of the entanglement between public space and political narrative that needs further investigation because this relationship holds implications for both urban life and citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative news reporting in Australia about African immigrants is of concern to them. It hasrealimpacts on their everyday lives, ranging from discriminatory treatment by police to difficulties in gaining employment. This paper analyses interviews with eleven African immigrants and their views on negative news reporting about them. Participants argue that negative news reporting creates a barrier between African-Australians and other Australians. Negative news reporting also has the effect of endorsing the public’s already discriminatory and unfavourable attitudes towards African immigrants. African migrants have started working within the African community in order to educate its members about Australian cultures. They are also mobilized to unite under the Organisation of African Unity and distribute positive stories of African-Australians, utilizing African community media outlets. They have noticed some positive changes happening in the last few years, e.g. better treatment of Africans by police officers and an improving chance of employment. Regular African gatherings also attract a good number of the ‘Australian’ public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anthropologists and sociologists frequently suggest that marriage is undergoing rapid, worldwide transformation. Yet, while trends in nuptiality and divorce are used to demonstrate its decline, heterosexual marriage based on romantic love remains a cultural ideal in many contexts. This tension is reflected in cultural products like television programmes, including the increasingly popular genre of reality romance television. In this paper, we focus on an Australian version of a recent programme format, Married at First Sight (MaFS), in which ‘singles’ are matched by ‘relationship experts’ and then meet for the first time at their wedding ceremonies. The show purports to document singles’ lives prior to, during and following their weddings. By considering the content and structure of the show, as well as public and media responses to it, we explore Married at First Sight Australia in the context of other reality romance programmes produced and popular in Australia. We propose that the show offers a discourse of marriage based on objective compatibility rather than individual choice, but nonetheless dependent upon scripts of romantic love. Further, MaFS reflects (uneven) realities and popular understandings of transformation in modern Australian marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper is about the cultural figure of ‘the bogan’. It offers an analysis of the modes of sociality, the affective flows and the relational intensities through which the heterogeneous categories of ‘bogan’ and ‘anti-bogan’ take shape. It draws on the work of Sara Ahmed on ‘Affective Economies’ to explore how ‘bogan’ works as a ‘sticky sign’. The paper sits alongside other scholarly studies that elaborate the material-affective registers through which ‘bogan’ and ‘anti-bogan’ take shape, and are embodied and placed. However, where some see anti-boganism, in its various forms, as representing a newly animated class war driven by disgust, this paper argues that what is most remarkable, and challenging to analyse, is the very ordinariness of the identifications, and disidentifications, with ‘bogan’. This is not to suggest that class does not matter, but rather, that what happens around ‘bogan’ is as fleeting and labile as it is congealed and sticky. Attunement to the ambiguity and complexity of these movements, and the curious mingling of contempt and love that ‘bogan’ signifies, may afford some insights into the matter of class and culture in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arguing that Baz Luhrmann's Australia (2008) is a big-budget, non-independent film espousing a left-leaning political ideology in its non-racist representations of Aborigines on film, this paper suggests the addition of a ‘fourth formation’ to the 1984 Moore and Muecke model is warranted. According to their theorizing, racist ‘first formation’ films promote policies of assimilation whereas ‘second formation’ films avoid overt political statements in favour of more acceptable multicultural liberalism. Moore and Muecke's seemingly ultimate ‘third formation films’, however, blatantly foreground the director's leftist political dogma in a necessarily low budget, independent production. Australia, on the other hand, is an advance on the third formation because its left-leaning feminized Aboriginal voice is safely backed by a colossal production budget and indicates a transformation in public perceptions of Aboriginal issues. Furthermore, this paper argues that the use of low-cost post-production techniques such as voice-over narration by racially appropriate individuals and the use of diegetic song in Australia work to ensure the positive reception of the left-leaning message regarding the Stolen Generations. With these devices Luhrmann effectively counters the claims of right-wing denialists such as Andrew Bolt and Keith Windschuttle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Peter Duncan's film Unfinished Sky as an example of post-national Australian cinema. Addressing dominant frameworks in Australian film criticism that focus on the concept of the national, the paper argues that the 'national' has in fact been reconfigured in the cinema of the new millennium, placing it within a post-national or regional environment. In several recent Australian films there has been an increased engagement with the region, both in terms of the representation of regional areas outside Australia, such as Asia and the Middle East, as well as demonstrating a growing sense of openness to global influences and connections in remote or regional settings within the country. Addressing these various shifts, the paper questions how relevant is it to continue to define Australian cinema in terms of the 'national', as has long been dominant in Australian film scholarship, when aiming to take into account different races, ethnicities, and identities appearing on screen today. This is especially worth reconsidering since the demise of multiculturalism from the mid to late 1990s as an official cultural policy situated squarely within the framework of the national. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Broome Shire Council's decision in 2009 to suspend the sister-town relationship because of controversy over Taiji's practice of culling dolphins galvanized Broome's Asian and Asian-Aboriginal community (hereafter referred to as poly-ethnic community) to oppose this move. This, and other examples explored in this paper, attests to the strong connection between these two groups that has shaped a distinctive 'Broome culture'. This paper explores ways in which Japanese working in the pearling industry contributed to the emergence of a Broome culture through their historic ties with Aborigines. Some of these ties are through family lineage; others are through vast interlocking familial and friendship networks in Broome's Asian-Aboriginal community. Recent interviews attest to the enduring nature of these networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores some recent issues impacting on Australia's public imagination of a national identity. Utilizing an analysis that draws on Foucault's concept of biopolitics as a mechanism of governance, the paper examines how notions of Australian national identity develop through distinct but discursively-related fields: (1) policies and public discourse on the Australian Commonwealth Government's promotion of fertility through the Baby Bonus scheme; (2) public debate and popular culture texts on global overpopulation and climate change; and (3) the movement of populations and peoples of Australia in terms of how policies of migration and responses to refugees inflect dialogue on national identity. Discussing these together through the framework of biopolitics, it is argued that governmentality in Australia is not only biased towards the production of particular types of Australian identity but particular types of Australian. Drawing predominantly on news discourses, the paper examines some of the ways in which the interface between these different fields and objects of biopolitical regulation can be understood through public sphere debate, popular cultural texts, and an assessment of the ways in which Foucault's biopolitical technologies continue to centre on national, neo-liberal issues and exclude concerns around global overpopulation, resource sustainability, and world climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Australian cinema has produced popular movie genres since the 1970s, including action/adventure, road movies, crime, and horror movies, genre cinema has occupied a precarious position within a subsidized national cinema and has been largely written out of film history. In recent years the documentary Not Quite Hollywood (2008) has brought Australia's genre movie heritage from the 1970s and 1980s back to the attention of cinephiles, critics and cult audiences worldwide. Since its release, the term 'Ozploitation' has become synonymous with Australian genre movies. In the absence of discussion about genre cinema within film studies, Ozploitation (and 'paracinema' as a theoretical lens) has emerged as a critical framework to fill this void as a de facto approach to genre and a conceptual framework for understanding Australian genres movies. However, although the Ozploitation brand has been extremely successful in raising the awareness of local genre flicks, Ozploitation discourse poses problems for film studies, and its utility is limited for the study of Australian genre movies. This paper argues that Ozploitation limits analysis of genre movies to the narrow confines of exploitation or trash cinema and obscures more important discussion of how Australian cinema engages with popular movie genres, the idea of Australian filmmaking as entertainment, and the dynamics of commercial filmmaking practises more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One topic covered in Australian queer university student print media is the legalization of same-sex marriage. The legalization of same-sex marriage is currently generating much debate in Western queer communities. This paper explores Australian queer university student activists' media representation of same-sex marriage, and the debates surrounding its legalization. It uses discourse analysis to examine a selection of queer student media from four metropolitan Australian universities, and the 2003 and 2004 editions of the national queer student publication Querelle. This paper thus contributes to the history of queer activism, documenting what one group of young people say about the legalization of same-sex marriage, and furthers research on queer perspectives of marriage and same-sex relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current incarnation of 'reality TV' in Australia has a strong focus on the portrayal of everyday life. Although based on 'real' situations or people, there is a clear tension between ideas of authenticity and performance. As a global phenomenon, 'reality' formats are produced for local audiences by highlighting aspects of the national culture and identity, with format popularity directly linked to identification and affirmation of the spectacle of 'reality'. This paper will analyse the use of popular Australian myth in 'reality' formats by charting narrative and character construction as an 'illusory everyday', with reference to Bondi Rescue (Cordell Jigsaw). The paper will examine the representation of Australian identity through both myth and construction in 'reality TV' as the perpetuation of a cultural simulation. Implications for research on the genre and the industry are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Privileged' Jews include those prisoners in the camps and ghettos who held positions which gave them access to material and other benefits. Subject to extreme levels of coercion, these victims were compelled to act in ways that have been judged as both self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such situations, which exemplify what influential theorist Lawrence Langer terms 'choiceless choices', are the chief concern of Primo Levi's paradigmatic essay on the 'grey zone'. In light of these key conceptualizations of the ethical dilemmas of Holocaust victims, the paper analyses the representation of 'privileged' Jews in several videotestimonies recorded at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre (JHMRC) in Melbourne, Australia. It will be shown that judgements of victims in extremis cause considerable problems for attempts to testify to the complex situations and experiences of 'privileged' Jews. The role of the interviewer is a crucial factor in this, particularly when interviewers are themselves Holocaust survivors. The paper reveals that while it might be argued that moral evaluations of 'privileged' Jews should be suspended, judgements are often imposed on Holocaust testimonies in various ways and have a significant impact on their content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern times when we speak of a mobile lifestyle we think of backpackers, fruit pickers, tourists, bikies or people living in caravans. Some people, of course, deliberately choose such a lifestyle. In the context of the historical past, of the people who moved in and out of this place - Kalgoorlie (our conference venue) - one group in particular had a very mobile lifestyle, though not by choice. I refer to the Afghan camel drivers who came to Australia for economic reasons. They mostly arrived as single men and assisted the explorers in their expeditions, and contributed to the development of the infrastructure of the Australian outback. The camel drivers steered the camels, 'the ships of the desert', that carried water tanks out to the mining areas such as Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie and other areas where water was scarce. The camels also carried wool bales and boxes of merchandize from one part of Australia to another. And they carted sleepers for the construction of railway lines from Perth to Coolgardie, and materials for the development of the Overland Telegraph Line in South Australia back in 1870-1872. The mobile nature of the lives of the Afghan camel drivers never permitted them to stay in one place for long. The Afghans were predominantly Muslims. They retained their culture and religion in such a harsh lifestyle. In this paper I examine the pattern of their mobile lifestyle from 1860 to 1930 and discuss their identity when they were with other ethnic groups, conflict when they faced resistance and their outspoken nature when they were regarded as the 'other'. Finally, I consider their loyalty to their Australian employers (and explorers). This paper relies on both primary and secondary sources, including oral testimonies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public debate about reconciliation in Australia has been polarized by a distinction between the symbolic and the practical. Challenging this false dichotomy, this paper explores courageous listening as a practice that entails both responsiveness and creative action. Although listening can function as a way of responding to the other and expanding the possibility for shared action; it is nonetheless not inherently open or transformative. Indeed, public debate about the Australian federal government's Northern Territory Intervention is examined as a case study that manifests communicative practices which preserve, rather than transform, established hierarchies of attention. The terms of this debate also, however, contain listening practices grounded in the ideal of responsiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an analysis of recent print media/magazine advertisements featuring home theatre systems and Plasma as well as LCD televisions in Australia. In their promotion of large new flat television screens, the paper reveals how advertisers highlight the social atomization of space by creating private, isolated cinematic spaces where television viewing is privatized. As a consequence, broadcasting as a collective shared experience is diminished. The focus on the isolated viewer who can personalize and atomize his or her viewing experience privileges a form of privatization (Williams, 1974, 26-27) that stresses the “self-sufficient” home, enabled through a kind of technological mobility. My main argument is that the advertisements signify a privatized individual viewer. Rarely do they suggest that television watching is also a social and collective experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1950s, rock’n’roll as both a musical genre and a pervasive youth cultural form spread from the U.S. to emerge in various regionalized forms throughout most Western societies. Through the development of various social, technological and industrial circumstances, rock’n’roll was the first youth subculture in Perth, Western Australia to develop widespread acknowledgement across popular cultural consciousness. From its roots in working-class culture to its eventual commercial embrace by middle-class audiences, rock’n’roll developed in Perth through a set of specific circumstances linked to both racial and class-based factors, distinctive to the city as a small, isolated and predominantly suburban location. Whilst the majority of historical analysis on early rock’n’roll focuses on Australia’s east coast, this paper attempts to counter that by drawing from interviews conducted with a number of individuals who were instrumental in the emergence of rock’n’roll in Perth. As such this essay delivers a social history of the style as it developed in that city, placing it at the beginning of a fundamental shift in popular music as a cultural phenomenon, and underlining the importance that a number of specific social and cultural factors including class and race played in the development of a locally specific rock’n’roll culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social enterprise is a growing force in the Australian economy, with great potential for local job-creation and stimulating new entrepreneurship across the service, manufacturing and retail industries. However, the sector also has a ‘dark side’ – whereby its social welfare agendas are sidelined in favour of profit-driven motives, the outsourcing of government services and perpetuation of inequalities between those that manage and those that benefit from the enterprises. In this light, it is perhaps not surprising that social enterprise literature has emerged predominantly from the field of business management, resulting in an over-representation of perspectives that privilege the economic, and technocratic, aspects of social entrepreneurship. This is particularly problematic in the context of the arts, which often challenge, transform and exceed conventional understandings of social value. This paper explores the potential role of art- and fashion-based social enterprises in contributing to sustainable community development while also activating positions of critique and political engagement from inside the mechanisms of contemporary capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]