We need to talk (denim workshop)

A collaborative, participatory denim craft station installed by the LEVEL feminist collective in the Q[ARI] Project - Artist-Run Initiatives exhibition, at the Griffith University Art Gallery in 2013. The exhibition was funded by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, and featured seven artist-run-initiatives from Brisbane.

We need to talk (MCA picnic)

This collaborative, participatory work by feminist collective LEVEL took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) as part of the official program of activities surrounding the exhibition 'War is over: (If you want it!): Yoko Ono', 2013. It took the form of a public picnic where women and their friends were invited to share food and discuss what they wanted to see in the world. Groups discussed their desires before a public declaration of these outside the museum at Circular Quay in Sydney.

‘It's all scientific to me’ : focus group insights into why young people do not apply safe-sex knowledge

Despite rising levels of safe-sex knowledge in Australia, sexually transmitted infection notifications continue to increase. A culture-centred approach suggests it is useful in attempting to reach a target population first to understand their perspective on the issues. Twenty focus groups were conducted with 89 young people between the ages of 14 and 16 years. Key findings suggest that scientific information does not articulate closely with everyday practice, that young people get the message that sex is bad and they should not be preparing for it and that it is not appropriate to talk about sex. Understanding how young people think about these issues is particularly important because the focus groups also found that young people disengage from sources of information that do not match their own experiences.

Continuing Bonds

Some of the oldest surviving examples of human creativity are items connected to death rituals. Despite the complexity of historical death rituals, the visceral sensations of grief are largely repressed or ignored in contemporary society – but where social ritual falters, art attempts to fill the gap. This catalogue essay was written to accompany Karike Ashworth's contemporary art exhibition, 'Lamentation', an exploration of grief, at The Hold Artspace in Brisbane.

The sideways hourglass : establishing the lemniscate as a narrative structure for writing and reading non-linear stories

This thesis is a study in narratology that examines the pre-theoretical ideas that underlie the study of narrative and time. The thesis explores how the lemniscate can be transported from geometry to narrative in order to structure a non-linear story that breaks the rules of causality and chronology by coupling physical movement through space with the backward pull of memory. The findings offer new possibilities for understanding the nexus between shape and story and for recording non-linear narratives that are marked by simultaneity, counterpoint, and reversal.

‘He has a way gayer Facebook than I do’ : investigating sexual identity disclosure and context collapse on a social networking site

This study extends previous research into social networking sites (SNSs) as environments that often reduce spatial, temporal, and social boundaries, which can result in collapsed contexts for social situations. Context collapse was investigated through interviews and Facebook walkthroughs with 27 LGBTQ young people in the United Kingdom. Since diverse sexualities are often stigmatized, participants’ sexual identity disclosure decisions were shaped by both the social conditions of their online networks and the technological architecture of SNSs. Context collapse was experienced as an event through which individuals intentionally redefined their sexual identity across audiences or managed unintentional disclosure. To prevent unintentional context collapse, participants frequently reinstated contexts through tailored performances and audience separation. These findings provide insight into stigmatized identity performances in networked publics while situating context collapse within a broader understanding of impression management, which paves the way for future research exploring the identity implications of everyday SNS use.

Book Review : "The Media Gaze: Representations of Diversities in Canada by Augie Fleras". Vancouver and Toronto: UBC Press, 2011.

The Media Gaze effectively shatters the assumption that Canada, in all its political correctness, is a cultural mosaic free of discrimination and prejudice. While great strides have been made to reduce blatant racism and sexism in Canadian media, Fleras illustrates how discriminatory and oppressive discourses are still very present in news, television, and film.He brings to light the structural, institutional, and practice-oriented means by which the media is systemically biased toward privileging mainstream audiences while misrepresenting minority groups in the public eye...