From Cultural Studies to Cultural Research: Engaged Scholarship in the Twenty-first Century

Is, or should cultural studies be, a discipline or not? What exactly is its object? Should cultural studies be focused on influencing policy or be an agent of critique? What is the role of theory? What kind of theory? Should textual analysis or ethnography predominate? The regular reiteration of such questions reveals an ongoing sense of crisis, a general apprehensiveness over the question whether cultural studies is able to live up to its own self-declared aspirations, both intellectually and politically

Culture and Communication : Towards an Ethnographie Critique of Media Consumption in the Transnational Media System

The irresistible march of transnational media has given rise to widely experienced problems concerning cultural autonomy and identity. The research tradition of "cultural studies" offers a very appropriate and distinctive way of analysing these questions, especially by means of a critical ethnography of reception. The tendency in some recent reception research to celebrate "the popular" as a source of resistance to "the hegemonic" is criticized.Le développement irrésistible des médias transnationaux a provoqué un peu partout des problèmes d'autonomie et d'identité culturelles. Les « études culturelles » permettent d'analyser ces problèmes dans le cadre d'une ethnographie critique de la réception. Cet article met en question la tendance de certaines études récentes sur la réception à célébrer le « populaire » comme source de résistance

A ficção televisiva no mundo: melodrama e ironia em perspectiva global

O livro Watching Dallas, publicado na década de 1980 estuda as discussões sobre a recepção da novela norte-americana Dallas. Décadas depois, parece adequado olhar para esses anos que separam o lançamento do livro e o momento atual e pensar sobre o que mudou na cultura televisiva, especialmente no que se refere à série televisiva dramática. A ironia com que os telespectadores veem as novelas desde então nos Estados Unidos e alguns melodramas produzidos e veiculados na Ásia são alguns dos pontos analisados

Literature Review : The Contribution of Social and Cultural Infrastructure to Liveability

This literature review was commissioned to support the Northern Sydney Regional Organisation of Councils (NSROC) in obtaining a better understanding of the role of social and cultural infrastructure in enhancing regional liveability. The review of research and policy initiatives is across 15 Australian and 6 international reports which discuss the value of social and cultural infrastructure, and its relationship with liveability. From this review, it was clear that not only is there no single, definitive understanding of social and cultural infrastructure, but social infrastructure often embraces cultural infrastructure in conceptual terms. For this reason, the report proposes that the synthetic notions of culturally-focused social infrastructure and/or socially-focused cultural infrastructure are used in the interests of flexibility and feasibility

Asian Australian Writing

This special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the result of a collaboration with the South Asian Diaspora International Research Network (SADIRN) at Monash University, Australia, engages with Asian Australian writing, a phenomenon that has been staking out a place in the Australian literary landscape since the 1950s and 1960s. It has now burgeoned into an influential area of cultural production, known for its ethnic diversity and stylistic innovativeness and demanding new forms of critical engagement involving transnational and transcultural frameworks. As Wenche Ommundsen and Huang Zhong point out in their article in this issue, the very term “Asian Australian” signals a heterogeneity that rivals that of the dominant Anglo Australian culture; just as white Australian writing displays the lineaments of its complex European heritage, so hybridised works by multicultural writers from mainland China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Singapore and Malaysia can be read in terms of their specific national, ethnic, linguistic and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, this category’s primary location within the space of the host or Australian nation has determined its reception and interpretation. Marked by controversial representations of historical and present-day encounters with white Australian culture, debates on alterity, representational inequality, and consciousness of its minority status, Asian Australian writing has become a force field of critical enquiry in its own right (Ommundsen 2012, 2)

Creative Production Synergies in Penrith and the Blue Mountains

Regional leadership in arts and cultural production is evident in Penrith and the Blue Mountains through the different yet complementary approaches of the City Councils. This research project began in August 2019, the interview phase was completed in early December 2019, and this report was completed in June 2020. Therefore, the research spanned a very challenging period of drought and severe bushfires over the summer across New South Wales, followed almost immediately by the COVID-19 pandemic. Businesses in arts and recreation services were among the first and most severely affected by the need to enforce Government social distancing restrictions, with 94 per cent of the sector reporting an adverse impact of the Government restrictions in the March Business COVID-19 survey (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2020). This report has shown the need for investment in creative production capacity building – a need which has now significantly increased

A Pacific sojourn: Anna Kavan and the New Zealand connection 1941-2

This article examines Anna Kavan’s sojourn in New Zealand from February 1941 to November 1942 in the company of the pacifist playwright Ian Hamilton. Living in the most remote of the ex-British colonies reinforced Kavan’s ontological sense of homelessness and wish to disidentify from British society, yet the colony’s anglophone orientation offered familiarity within the strange and alien. The geography, landscapes and communities of its Pacific islands encouraged a reshaping of her imaginative engagement with otherness. Referring to Kavan’s recently published diary, ‘Five Months Further or What I Remember ab[ou]t New Zealand’, the essay argues that the New Zealand ‘experience’ encouraged her use of tropes of the Gothic and uncanny as she grappled with issues of distance, homelessness and disjunctive reality. The discussion focuses on the alternative/parallel world that New Zealand represents in stories published in I Am Lazarus (1945). It identifies experimental techniques associated with Gothic fiction by which Kavan registers the overlapping dualisms of war-torn London and idyllic rural New Zealand, and represents memory through framing devices and defamiliarizing rhetorical tropes as a distancing activity interrupting the present moment: dream sequences, irruptions into and splittings of reality, space and time reversals, doublings of self/other, disjunctive non sequiturs and ghostly mirror imaging

In the Living Room: Second Screens and TV Audiences

© The Author(s) 2015. This article is based on a small pilot project exploring the role, function, and meanings of second screens and companion apps for TV audiences that is contextualized by existing academic audience research. This is mapped alongside industry research and academic debate about second screens. The results illustrate some disjunction between industry expectations of usage and viewers' everyday experiences. I argue that industries' tendency to conflate "viewer" with "fan" indicates a less than nuanced understanding of the television/companion app audience. Further, the lean forward/lean back binary applied to digital media users and television audiences respectively points to a problematic not addressed in much industry literature, while the respondents for this research indicate a complex interplay between the pleasures of viewing that incorporates the social and the personal with the second screen and the TV text

Planning Cultural Infrastructure for the City of Parramatta: A Research Report

Parramatta is dramatically changing, cultural practices are shifting, and the demands on cultural infrastructure are becoming increasingly complex. This report provides the necessary research and information to assist the City of Parramatta in determining its strategic priorities regarding the development of cultural infrastructure in the City. There are three components of the report - Audit, Benchmarking, and Needs Analysis. Part 1 of this report provides an audit of Parramatta’s cultural infrastructure, its patronage and future needs and trends. It provides a realistic assessment of the gaps in existing cultural infrastructure and facilities in Parramatta and of how the cultural needs of its current and future populations are met. Part 2 of this report provides key data regarding a selection of relevant national and international cities for comparison with Parramatta. Part 3 of this report describes the specific short-term and medium-term needs for investment and planning required to bring Parramatta’s cultural infrastructure profile to that of world-class regional cultural capital