Publics, politics and power: Remaking the public in public services

Challenges the notion that publicness and the public sphere is in decline, and analyses the emergence of new forms, sites and practices of publicness and the implications for public services. Covers: - shifting formations of nation and the challenges of migration, diversity and faith to universalistic notions of the public - how the emphasis on of civil society and community are recasting the public domain - the emergence of hybrid organsiational forms and public private authority - new strategies for governing publics and public service

Fire without smoke and other phantoms of Ambon's violence: Media effects, agency, and the work of the imagination

Wetensch. publ. referee

‘Wot do u call it? Doof doof’: Articulations of glocality in Australian grime music

Grime music emerged at the turn of the millennium in the United Kingdom. While grounded and street-level at its outset, the form has since become global in reach. This article focuses on performance practice in the East Australian grime scene and its development over time. Principally, it attends to how MCs and DJs articulate a sense of belonging to both the UK and their local communities in Melbourne and Sydney, through lyrical and musical signification. These articulations are shown to be an example of ‘glocal’ performance practice, which is locally situated yet globally rendering. The article also demonstrates how these artists’ conceptions of legitimate practice are heavily mediated by YouTube videos of canonical UK practice, owing to their geographical dislocation from the genre’s initial point of origin. As a result, radio performances – known as ‘sets’ – and live shows are often prioritized over recorded releases. These findings are supported by interviews with Australian artists, and musical analysis of two key performances: a radio set on Australian broadcaster Triple J from November 2018 and a global grime showcase on London’s Rinse FM from January 2019

Saturated and situated: expanding the meaning of media in the routines of everyday life

Recently media scholars have made renewed calls for non-media-centric, non-representational and phenomenological approaches to media studies. This article responds to this context through an investigation of how media form part of the experiential, habitual and unspoken dimensions of everyday routines. Drawing on examples from ethnographic research into digital media and domestic energy consumption, we explore the role of media in the making and experiencing of environments, centring on their salience to daily routines of transition in the home. While media content forms part of how people make their homes, attention to these routines brings into focus a notion of the 'media-saturated' household that goes beyond attention to media content in significant ways. This, we argue, has both theoretical and practical implications for how we situate and interpret media as part of everyday life. © The Author(s) 2013

Enchanted encounters: moving images, public art and an ethical sense of place

This article examines site-specific moving images, particularly public artworks that engage windows and monuments as cinematic screens. Employing the concept of enchantment and Doreen Massey’s notion of a ‘global sense of place’, this article analyses how the physical experience of moving image media in public places can enrich and complicate our understanding of place. Artworks by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Ofri Cnaani, Krzysztof Wodiczko and Tony Oursler are explored, in addition to recent protest projections and critical and theoretical investigations of place and enchantment

Unsettled City: Neoliberal redevelopment, state crisis, slum resettlement & biopolitical struggle in Mumbai

This dissertation concerns capitalist urban redevelopment and the government of urban housing poverty. It examines the ways urban redevelopment regimes shape resettlements and governance of urban populations in Mumbai. The specific enquiries focus on salient accumulative and dispossessive dimensions of urban redevelopment and linked resettlement construction, the reformation of informal politics of the poor, and possibilities of reordering renewal and resettlement governance processes. These enquiries are addressed through an ethnographic exploration of two mega-projects: transport expansion and pipeline securitization, two resettlement townships, and their multi-scalar and multi-site sociopolitical dynamisms. The theoretical framework of “redevelopment as governmentality” guides analysis connecting macro-institutional practices and their human consequences.This is a compilation dissertation with a Kappa (comprehensive discussion) and four sole-authored journal articles. The dissertation makes four major contributions: First, urban redevelopment regimes employ an extractive-inclusive political economy in resettlement housing developments, which promotes urban growth. This is beyond facilitative or welfarist rehousing linked with displacement-based dispossession. The underlying political-economic logics, and institutional and policy frameworks also shape the life-allowing and limiting materiality of resettlement. Second, state and NGO-mediated resettlements employ unconditional urban displacements through strategies that speak of institutional violence, coercion, and abandonment, but are coated with the hope of inclusion and aspirational formal urban living. Uneven sociopolitical outcomes include contested formalization, widespread institutional vulnerabilities, and arbitrary post-dispossession rule. Third, state powers in redevelopment are complicit in creating death-allowing settlement forms and environmental concerns, and subjecting populations to them. Inhabiting such violent materialities exposes the embedded deadly powers, through life-compromising living. Inhabitation also leads to a new outlook of resistance and negotiation that redefines the politics of human lives at the urban margins. Fourth, the state bureaucracy maintains life-constraining post-resettlement scenarios and biopolitical struggles through arbitrary, informalized, humanistic interventions, and using a new vocabulary of urban habitability. This life-compromising subjection, however, also impacts urban renewal and allows some alternative rehousing. Overall, the dissertation shows certain contradictory outcomes of urban renewal and population governance in the making of the urban imaginary and modernity

Testing Powers of Engagement: Green Living Experiments, the Ontological Turn and the Undoability of Involvement

This article explores the role of sustainable living experiments as devices of public engagement. It engages with object-centred perspectives in the sociology of science and technology, which have characterized public experiments as sites for the domestication of technology, and as effective instruments of public involvement, because, in part, of the seductive force of their use of empirical forms of display. Green living experiments, which are conducted in the intimate setting of the home and reported on blogs, complicate this understanding, insofar as they seek to format socio-material practices as sites of involvement. This has implications for how we conceive of the relations between these two phenomena. While socio-material practices are often located outside the public sphere, green living experiments extend the publicity genre of ‘being intimate in public’ to things. It also follows that green living experiments do not so much solve but rather articulate problems of public involvement