Indigeneity in the Contemporary World: Performance, Politics, Belonging
A unique opportunity exists for four outstanding post-doctoral scholars to join a dynamic interdisciplinary team investigating how Indigeneity is expressed and understood in our complex, globalising world. With funding of €2.36M over five years from the European Research Council, this frontier research, led by Professor Helen Gilbert at Royal Holloway (University of London), focuses on performance in relation to four conceptual themes: ‘Commodity and Spectacle’, ‘Heritage and Material Culture’, ‘Reconciliation and Social Cohesion’ and ‘Mobility and Belonging’. Applicants will be considered from across a range of disciplines including, but not limited to theatre and performance studies, film, cultural geography, anthropology, history, indigenous studies, sociology, politics, dance, ethnomusicology, international relations.
Suitable applicants will have some knowledge of performance studies, an outstanding research record relative to opportunity and a sound understanding of specific indigenous cultures in one or more of the following regions: the Americas, the Pacific, Australia, Southern Africa.
Applicants should have gained a PhD in a relevant discipline before the interview dates on 25–26 November 2010. Exceptions for candidates very close to completing their doctoral studies will be only made in cases where there is an extensive track record of high-quality research publications in one of the project fields.
Host: Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University Venue: Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
It wasn’t so long ago that with heroin chic and SM clubbing, what had been considered unacceptable became a voguish pretext for mass marketing. Now, with global hysteria about paedophilia and violent computer games and increasing calls for internet censorship, the unacceptable is being reinvented as an object of policing.
The issue of what is ‘fit to present’ has always haunted culture, especially in its relationship with social institutions: the proscription of heresy, the erasure of bodies (because of their age, race or gender), the silencing of sexualities, the purging of languages, the classification of desires as pathologies … marking things as unacceptable has been a key strategy in governing the media, education, the arts as well as the practice of everyday life. Conversely, resistance to the banning of texts and practices has long been one of the hallmarks of movements for liberalisation.
Understanding how bodies, images and practices are judged unacceptable is key to understanding how culture, communication and creativity fit into society.
Issues:
• What is now unacceptable?
• Did the unacceptable ever go away or did it merely shift from what was outlaw to an object of voyeurism?
• How does what is deemed unacceptable reflect the racial, gender and sexual fault-lines of a society?
• From incineration to pathologization: how have strategies for policing the unacceptable evolved?
Abstracts are sought that engage with topics such as (but not limited to):
• Body modification
• Pornography
• Transgression in the Arts
• Political censorship
• Youth Culture and Behaviour
• Free speech
• Hate speech
• Excommunication
• Sexual Subcultures
• Outlaw Fashion
• Social Networking sites
• Political and aesthetic avant-gardes
• Gangs
• Imposture
• Homophobia
• Drug culture
• Infidelity
• Secret Lives
• Welfare dependency
• Internet censorship
• Religious cults
• Violence
• Worklessness
• Control of school and higher education curriculums
• Obesity
• Behaviour in Public Space
• Racism
Please send abstracts of 300 words, or panel proposals, via email to unacceptableconference@gmail.com by Friday, 30th September 2010.
Sponsored and hosted by the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University, Australia.
This special call asks the question, what is the climate of publics-based research in public relations, and what are current challenges and approaches to the strategic segmentation of publics by organisations? Vasquez and Taylor (2001) asserted, “the public is often understood as a means to an organization’s end goal. Publics are, however, an integral part of public relations practice, and as a communicatively constructed social phenomenon, they deserve serious attention” (pp. 139-140). The common definition used to conceptualise a public stems from Dewey’s (1927) understanding of the public: a group of individuals that organically emerge when impacted by a problem and who share a common interest in solving that common problem. However, although the public is the core concept of public relations, it is not well-defined or evolved to fit current media, political, and organisational climates. Furthermore, some prominent theories of publics have been criticised as inflexible in addressing the shifting nature of publics and the social construction of issues in the minds of publics: “When a public is conceptualized as a state of consciousness or as a sum of aggregate variables, the nature, role and influence of communication are overlooked completely, or at a minimum are taken for granted” (Vasquez & Taylor, 2001, p. 150).
To address the criticisms, new work is being done in this area. Kim and Grunig (in press) have initiated a new wave of studies that elaborates on traditional information-seeking variables, such as information forwarding. Vardeman and Tindall (in press) have challenged the basic premise of aggregating identities through additive identity approaches that most practitioners and researchers have used to identify publics, and in their research on health message construction for women of color, they found that multiplicative identities impact how women perceive messages and act on messages. Although the situational theory did apply to the publics, cultural and socioeconomic variables (which heavily impacted how women perceived the messages) were not addressed in the theory. This research echoes Sha’s work (2006) that used cultural identity theory to go beyond the typical and stagnant demographic approaches to segmenting publics.
The purpose of this special issue is to re-examine and question the basic set of assumptions about publics and serve as the natural extension of Vasquez and Taylor’s (2001) call to explore publics in greater depth and through multiple prisms: “The challenge for public relations scholars and professionals is twofold: to demystify the ambiguity of a public and to link theory with practice for more effective relationships with publics” (p. 154). The purpose of this special issue is to explore recent developments within the current segmentation theories, to highlight other theories that communicators can use to segment and prioritise publics, to highlight how publics are dynamic and socially constructed phenomena that simple aggregative techniques cannot measure, and to demonstrate how these approaches have been used in practice.
Potential Manuscript Topics:
This call for papers invites research that explores new facets and approaches to conceptualising and segmenting publics.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
Cultural identity factors in understanding and segmenting publics
Intersectionality and the use of this theory in understanding publics
Evaluation and measurement of segmentation
Impact of culture, ethnicity, and globalization on the segmentation of publics
Development of methods to segment publics
Use of social media and Web 2.0 technologies to explore segmentation
Application of segmentation approaches to reach publics
The role that internal diversity of practitioners plays in the understanding of diverse publics
Theories of public-specific communication (e.g., according to identities like race, gender, class, sexual orientation, role identity [e.g., as a parent, as a student, as a community activist], nationality, among other identities, as well as according to situations)
This issue will be prepared during 2011 for publication before the end of that year.
Queries: If you have questions about this CFP or would like to express interest in being part of this exciting project in 2011, please contact the guest editors Natalie Tindall drnatalietjtindall@gmail.com and/or Jennifer Vardeman-Winter jvardema@Central.UH.EDU
Call for Papers (CFP): Interrogating Multiculturalism in Aotearoa/ New Zealand: An Asian Studies Perspective
A One-day Symposium hosted by the Asia-NZ Research Cluster at Otago University
When: 19 February 2011 Where: University of Otago, Dunedin Abstract submission deadline: Wednesday 15 September 2010
New Zealand history and culture is an admixture of indigenous, settler and immigrant interrelations. Yet debates about multiculturalism have emerged here only of late. Why so, and in what ways?
At one level, a certain “multiculturalism” is visible through, e.g., celebrations to mark the Chinese New Year or the Diwali Festival of Lights as well as through new commodities (food) and activities (the martial arts). At another level, ideas about multiculturalism are receiving greater attention in government, community and popular discourse. Both levels call for investigation.
Questions to be explored include – but are not limited to:
1) What roles do religion, language, education, government, sports, food, fashion, art or architecture play in Kiwi multiculturalism?
2) What, if anything, is unique about multiculturalism in NZ? Is there a dominant form of multiculturalism in NZ? What is the place of Maori and Pakeha representations – taken together or respectively – in multicultural discourse?
3) How is multiculturalism in NZ linked to debates about nation, ethnicity, pluralism or cosmopolitanism?
As in the past, the research cluster’s symposium will culminate in a quality peer-reviewed publication.
Please send paper title, 200-word abstract and contact details to Dr Gautam Ghosh at gautam.ghosh@otago.ac.nz .
The symposium is free of charge and open to the public.
The Graphic Novels and Comics Conference Manchester Metropolitan University: 5th and 6th July 2011 Audiences and Readership / Space and Time
Audiences and Readership
At the Graphic Novels and Comics Conference 2010, a major issue identified by the plenary panel as crucial for future directions regarding comics research was that of audiences and readership. Martin Barker, who pioneered and championed comics research when it was unfashionable reinforced this issue when reviewing the conference in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics noting, ‘it is striking to me…that no-one is currently following through to ask any of the questions we can and should, about readers, collectors, reviewers, circuits of reception, or even the longer-term shifting public status of comics.’ Whilst there has been some excellent work researching comics audiences and readership, this is currently, as Martin suggests, a largely neglected area. In summarising work in this area, Barker’s works on ideology (1989), readers (1993, 1997) and censorship (1984) examine the ways audiences consume such texts. Gibson’s work on female comics readers (2003a &b) demonstrates the ways comics influence identity construction and the transgressive reading practices of some female fans. She has also written on historical children’s comic collecting in Britain (2008) and tentatively begun work on British manga audiences (2007). In addition, Wright’s work on the development of the comics industry and distribution practices shows how audiences are influenced by but also influence comics creation and production (2001). However, as Martin suggested there is scope for many more sustained explorations of comics audiences and readership.
The aim of this conference, therefore, is to open up debates in comics audiences and readership. A longer term aim is to produce a special themed issue of The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics on these topics. Accordingly we are looking for papers in (but not confined to) the following areas surrounding audiences and readership:
Fandom, niche markets and subcultures
• Gendered identities (fanboys, women comics readers, encoded readership, manga readership)
• Subcultural reception and consumption – e.g. fractured identities, responses and poaching of specific texts, slash, cosplay, comicons
• Comics shops and their clientele
• Online comics production and production
• Comics collecting and collections
• Children, childhood and comics
• Library collections
Censorship
• Children perceived as a problematic audience
• Moral panics (e.g. horror comics, underground comics such as the work of Crumb)
• Specific case studies – e.g. Mike Diana and the Boiled Angel case
• National and local collection policies for library and other collections
Globalization, localities
• Hybrid identities
• Relationship between dominant Americanised texts vs localised texts
• Localities and small press comics production
• Subcultures on the internet
• Local responses to global texts
We are also interested in papers on research methods and theories in audiences and readership including:
• Assessing the effectiveness of qualitative and quantitative methods (focus groups, interview methods, snowballing, internet rhetoric, etc)
• Ideological, rhetorical, discursive analytical methods
• Reception theory – e.g. encoding/decoding
Space and Time
Comics’ flexible use of space and time allow for a wide range of creative approaches to storytelling. In accordance with Studies in Comics’ pursuit of articulating a specific theory of comics, we also invite papers that discuss the representation of space and time in non-European comics. The aim of this is to enhance the conference themes by including papers that fall outside the remit of the Bande Dessinée conference days, and to publish selected papers in a future issue of Studies in Comics.
Accordingly we also welcome papers in (but not confined to) the following areas:
• Uses of sequential or panoramic panels
• Distortion or manipulation of time
• Critiques of narratological approaches
• Representations of the past and future
• Methods of capturing the present
• Temporality and science fiction influences
• Aesthetics and the depiction of space
• Philosophical or scientific approaches to temporality and spatiality in comics
Please send abstracts of 250 words to comicsconference@gmail.com to reach us by December 1st 2010. Proposals for panels are also welcomed. Please indicate in the heading of your email whether your submission deals with “AUDIENCE” or “SIC-SPACE/TIME”.
Bibliography
Martin Barker, (1989) Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics. Manchester University Press.
Martin Barker, (1984) A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign. London: Pluto Press.
Martin Barker, (1993) Seeing how you can see: On being a fan of 2000AD. In: Buckingham, D. (ed.) Reading Audiences: Young People and the Media, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 160-180.
Martin Barker, (1997) Taking an extreme case: Understanding a Fascist fan of Judge Dredd. In: Cartmell, D., Hunter I.Q., Kaye, H. & Whelehan, I. (eds.) Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and its Audience, London: Pluto Press, pp. 14-30.
David Buckingham (ed) (1993) Reading Audiences: Young People and the Media. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press
Mel Gibson (2007) ‘“What is this mango, anyway?” Manga and younger readers in Ireland and Britain’. INIS. The magazine of Children’s Books Ireland, Dublin: CBI.
Mel Gibson (2003a) ‘'You can’t read them, they’re for boys!’ British Girls, American Superhero Comics and Identity'. International Journal of Comic Art Vol.5. No.1. Spring.
Mel Gibson (2003b) ‘What became of Bunty?’ The emergence, evolution and disappearance of the girls' comic in post-war Britain. In Bearne, E. and Styles, M. (eds.) Art, Narrative & Childhood. Trentham Books.
Mel Gibson (2008) What you read and where you read it, how you get it, how you keep it: Children, comics and historical cultural practice. Popular Narrative Media, Volume 1, Issue 2, Autumn 2008, pp 151-167
Angela McRobbie (1991) Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just Seventeen, London: Macmillan.
Nyberg, A. K. (1998) Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.
Pustz, Matthew J. (1999) Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. University Press of Mississippi
Spigel, Lynn. (1993) Seducing the Innocent. In: Solomon, W.S. & McChesney, R.W. (eds.) Ruthless Criticism: New Perspectives in U.S. Communications History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 264-265.
Frederick Wertham. (1954) The Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart.
Bradford W Wright (2001) Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press.
For your information: – Through their memories, many of our Chinese-Australian elders offer us a valuable link to Australia’s early Chinese immigrants – those who arrived during the gold rushes and its aftermath. The memories of these elders allow us to imagine what life was like in Australia from the 1930s through to the present day and offer us an insight into Chinese-Australian social, political and economic life.
We are rapidly losing this valuable insight as these elders move into their 80s and 90s. Fortunately the Museum of Chinese Australian History has received a grant from the Public Records Office of Victoria to record these memories as part of an oral history project that documents the lives of Chinese Australians in the pre-World War II period.
We would like your help in locating Chinese Australians in their 80s and 90s who can remember Australia in the 1930s and 1940s and might be interested in sharing their memories (in English or Cantonese).
Further information is available in the attached brochure. For further information please do not hesitate to contact Sophie Couchman on 9662 2888 or by email on curator@chinesemuseum.com.au.
Often called the “conscience of India”, Ashis Nandy is one of the world’s leading public intellectuals
The Untamed Language of Dissent: political activism and the dialogue between states
7:30pm, Friday 10th September 2010
Light refreshments 7pm
Village Roadshow Theatrette
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street, Melbourne 3000
(entrance from La Trobe Street)
Charges: Waged: $15; Unwaged: $10
UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY SYDNEY
CHINA, and COSMOPOLITAN CIVIL SOCIETIES RESEARCH CENTRES
You are invited to attend this colloquium on Chinese in Australian politics. Presenters will speak for 10 minutes to their pre-circulated papers. There will be a 10 minute response, and 10 minutes for discussion.
Hanifa Deen – “Muslim Fatigue, or Aren’t you Tired of the “M” Word Too?”http://ow.ly/2q5Ki
Hanifa Deen is fed up with writing about Muslims, reading about Muslims, defending Muslims and obsessing about Muslims in general but is having trouble getting off the ‘Muslim merry-go-round’.
In this Lunchbox/Soapbox presentation, Deen offers her vision for extending multiculturalism beyond tokenism. She also warns against oversimplification and the temptation to see ‘communities’ rather than individuals, and suggests a marketing campaign for Muslims – including a handful of star recruits who might help to bring Islam to the Australian heartland.
Feminist and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali brought her controversial take on Islam to Melbourne. She spoke to Jennifer Byrne about her personal journey from Islam, how “multiculturalism is a form of racism” and how human rights and cultural belief clash.
Hirsi Ali looks at how “Liberal societies enable, enhance, ignore what is going on” and asks why Australia’s politicians are ignoring the debate about Muslims in favour of “cosmetic debates” about burqas and minarets.
Since 1971, the UCLA Press has published Amerasia Journal, the leading interdisciplinary journal in Asian American Studies. After almost four decades and over 20,000 pages, Amerasia Journal has played an indispensable role in establishing Asian American Studies as a viable and relevant field of scholarship, teaching, community service, and public discourse. Amerasia Journal, according to founding publisher and AASRN member Don T. Nakanishi, “has benefited from and reflected a wide array of profound social changes that have occurred among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders—be it their unprecedented growth and diversification, or their ever-increasing levels of access, representation, and achievement in American society’s institutions and sectors that had long excluded, marginalized, or demonized them.”
