On blowing up the pokies: The pokie lounge as a cultural site of neoliberal governmentality in Australia

In 1999 The Whitlams, a popular ‘indie’ band named after a former Australian prime minister whose government was controversially sacked in 1975 by the Governor-General, released a single titled ‘Blow up the Pokies’. Written about a former band member’s fatal attraction to electronic gaming machines (henceforth referred to as ‘pokies’), the song was mixed by a top LA producer, a decision that its writer and The Whitlam’s front-man, Tim Freedman, describes as calculated to ‘get it on big, bombastic commercial radio’. The investment paid off and the song not only became a big hit for the band, it developed a legacy beyond the popular music scene, with Freedman invited to write the foreword of a ‘self-help manual for giving up gambling’ as well as appearing on public affairs television shows to discuss the issue of problem gambling. The lyrics of ‘Blow up the Pokies’ frame the central themes of this article: spaces, technologies and governmentality of gambling. It then explores what cultural articulations of resistance to the pokie lounge tell us about broader social and cultural dynamics of neoliberal governmentality in Australia

Saving Hope

A review on Ghassan Hage's Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society (Pluto Press Australia, Sydney, 2003)

Beyond white virtue: reflections on the first decade of critical race and whiteness studies in the Australian academy

This article undertakes two related tasks. Firstly, it provides one account of the origins of the Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association ACRAWSA) in 2003 and considers some of its significant events, publications and relationships. Secondly, it reflects on the survival of critical race and whiteness studies(CRWS) in the cultural space of the neo-liberal university. The arguments of three critical race and whiteness studies scholars are used to support me on this journey. To understand the challenges of thinking, speaking and writing critically about matters of race and whiteness, I draw on David Theo Goldberg’s distinction between anti- racism and anti-racialism in The Threat of Race (2009). I draw on Sara Ahmed’s study On Being Included (2012) to explain an increasing disarticulation between an anti- racist politics centred on equality—on the one hand—and ‘diversity’ talk and practice —on the other. The last part of the talk turns to the matter of Indigenous sovereignty, drawing on a key concept from the work of ACRAWSA’s founding president, Aileen Moreton-Robinson. I argue that ACRAWSA’s focus on everyday manifestations of the “possessive investment in patriarchal white sovereignty” (2011) have provided intellectual and ethical resilience in the face of the neo-liberal university’s radically individualising trajectory. I conclude with a call to scholars working within CRWS to resist the gendered temptation of white virtue as we enter the Association’s second decade

Notes on Captain Cook’s gambling habit: Settling accounts of white possession

This article brings critical race and whiteness theory and gambling studies together with recent academic ‘history experiments’ to engage with a field of academic research surrounding the figure of Captain Cook. An investigation of how ‘Cook culture’ is refracted through everyday practices, spaces and products of gambling highlights a habitus of white possession which continues to define Australian belonging against Indigenous sovereignty claims. I show how the belief that Cook, as an agent of history, couldn’t have done otherwise in his first encounters with Indigenous people in this place renders non- Indigenous people incapable of being otherwise than subjects of white possession. After linking processes of white home-making to a gambling logic implicit to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the illusio, I conclude with personal reflections to illustrate the role of fantasy in sustaining everyday manifestations of Cook Culture

Beyond the Figure of the Problem Gambler: Locating Race and Sovereignty Struggles in Everyday Cultural Spaces of Gambling

As gambling has become a ubiquitous feature of many neoliberal capitalist societies, the problem gambler has become a familiar cultural figure, invoked in regulation, popular culture and everyday life. This article brings critical research on governmentality together with cultural studies and critical Indigenous scholarship on whiteness, race and sovereignty to understand the racial biopolitics of gambling beyond the individual subject of problem gambling. I argue that, for settler-colonial states, gambling plays a role in maintaining tropes of cultural representation and securing legal and political power within an overarching system of white racial entitlement. An investigation of cultural spaces and products of gambling in Australia, together with close readings of Indigenous creative works, ties the figure of the problem gambler to broader processes of what Goldberg calls ‘racial neoliberalism’. I show how this figure becomes a metonym for dysfunctional consumption, is harnessed to racially targeted welfare reforms, and used to undermine the rights of Indigenous people, both as gamblers and as sovereign political and legal subjects

I\u27ve always been outspoken on what I think can be improved : An Interview with Dr. Garry J. Smith

Dr. Garry J. Smith has spent many years at the forefront of critical gambling research in Canada. In this interview he talks about the genesis of the Alberta Gambling Research Institute, how sociology brings a different lens to gambling studies than psychology, why he speaks out against certain aspects of commercial gambling, the relationship between fun and fairness, and the critical gaps in research that need to be added to address the inherent conflicts of interest that occur with self-regulated gambling. The interview was conducted by academics Fiona Nicoll and Mark R Johnson on 29 November, 2017. A transcript of the conversation was edited for publication. As part of this process, both interviewers and the interviewee were invited to edit their remarks

Locating whiteness in the academic production of "I Philosophy" in and of time and place

This review will critically evaluate two recent texts by white academics working across disciplines of cultural studies, history and anthropology and published by UNSW Press, which share a focus on the relationship between Aboriginality, Philosophy, Place and Time in Australia. I write from the position of a queer white academic committed to engaging politically and intellectually with the challenge of Indigenous sovereignties in this place while also aware that my position as a middle class white woman and intellectual imposes limits on what it is possible for me to know about Indigenous epistemologies (see Moreton-Robinson, 2000). In the course of this review I will demonstrate how anthropology's tendency to fix its objects of study within a circumscribed space of 'difference' limits the capacity of texts produced within this discipline to account for racialized struggles over sovereignty. While these struggles are equally embedded in the ethnographic context and the nation's constitution and political institutions, we will see that Muecke and Bird Rose confront problems in analysing the relationship between the intimate space of the 'field', in which one's research subjects quickly become one's 'friends' and/or 'classificatory kin'—on one hand—and the public space of the nation within which statements about Aboriginality by white academics circulate and are vested with an authority that escapes individual intentions and control—on the other