Crime and culture : a thematic reading of Sherlock Holmes and his adaptations.

This dissertation focuses on the adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character and stories into the television shows Sherlock and Elementary on air today. The project will consider three central questions: 1) Why is this Victorian detective hero still popular in the twenty-first century and what has remained constant and still resonates with modern audiences? 2) Both television shows transport Holmes in time by setting their narratives in the present day; therefore, what has been changed in this process of adaptation? 3) How do these changes represent shifts in our cultural thinking about important aspects of humanistic inquiry? The dissertation is organized around types of crime with each chapter devoted to a different crime that will bring to the fore specific themes central to the chapter. Chapter one is focused on the crime of murder and considers the intersection of reason and emotion. Chapter two examines the crime of smuggling and the representation of the East (with a specific focus on China). Chapter three considers the crimes of the powerful in order to focus on the relationship within society between those with power and money and those without such resources. Finally, chapter four is centered on the crime of blackmail in order to examine the relationship between public and private identities and information. This chapter addresses how the television shows have updated the understanding of public and private in response to digital technologies and the proliferation of online media

THEATRE FOR THE OPPRESSED: THE EFFECT AND INFLUENCE OF SHAKESPEARE IN PRISON

This thesis seeks to explore the powerful effect that Shakespeare has in prison settings. My research will prove that Shakespeare has clearly significant demonstrable influence on human beings in detention, particularly when they are speaking Shakespeare, and that speaking and acting Shakespeare’s words moves human beings in situations of incarceration or confinement in deeper and more unusual ways than in other contexts and thus enables them to reconnect with their humanity and the society they are removed from. The thesis begins with a general overview of the pervasiveness of Shakespeare in the modern world with an overview of a spectrum of diverse areas where Shakespeare is particularly valuable. It then moves on to explore the development of a number of global Shakespeare prison programs. The centrepiece of this dissertation concerns a case study based on my participation in the Queensland Shakespeare Ensemble’s 2011 Prison Project, which took place at a high security detention facility in Ipswich, Queensland. The QSE prison project is the only one of its kind to-date in Australia. It uniquely combines the methodology of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed with conventional drama practice and the Kristin Linklater method of voice training. This case study narrates the Shakespearean journey of a group of male prisoners and highlights the potential effectiveness of such a program in transforming violent offenders. The final chapter scrutinises in greater detail a number of the more exceptional Shakespeare prison theatre programs and their outcomes and links them to the Australian case study for comparative analysis

Sealand, HavenCo, and the Rule of Law

In 2000, a group of American entrepreneurs moved to a former World War II anti-aircraft platform in the North Sea, seven miles off the British coast, and launched HavenCo, one of the strangest start-ups in Internet history. A former pirate radio broadcaster, Roy Bates, had occupied the platform in the 1960s, moved his family aboard, and declared it to be the sovereign Principality of Sealand. HavenCo\u27s founders were opposed to governmental censorship and control of the Internet; by putting computer servers on Sealand, they planned to create a data haven for unpopular speech, safely beyond the reach of any other country. This article tells the full story of Sealand and HavenCo - and examines what they have to tell us about the nature of the rule of law in the age of the Internet. The story itself is fascinating enough: it includes pirate radio, shotguns and .50-caliber machine guns, rampant copyright infringement, a Red Bull skateboarding special, perpetual motion machines, and the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of State. But its implications for the rule of law are even more remarkable. Previous scholars have seen HavenCo as a straightforward challenge to the rule of law: by threatening to undermine national authority, HavenCo was implacably opposed to all law. As the fuller history shows, however, this story is too simplistic. HavenCo also depended on international law to recognize and protect Sealand, and on Sealand law to protect it from Sealand itself. Where others have seen HavenCo\u27s failure as the triumph of traditional regulatory authorities over HavenCo, the article argues that in a very real sense, HavenCo failed not from too much law but from too little. The law\u27 that was supposed to keep HavenCo safe was law only in a thin, formalistic sense, disconnected from the human institutions that make and enforce law. But without those institutions, law does not work, as HavenCo discovered