To be continued... fan fiction and the constructing of identity

This chapter contributes to the existing body of knowledge on fan fiction by reporting the findings from a quantitative and qualitative study on fan fiction in a Swedish context. The authors contextualize the fan fiction phenomenon as a part of a larger transformation of the media sphere and the society in general where media consumers’ role as collaborative cultural producers grows ever stronger. They explore what kind of stories inspire the writers and conclude that as in many other parts of the entertainment industry, fan fiction is dominated by a small number of international media brands. The authors show how fan fiction can play an important role in the development of adolescents’ literacies and identities and how their pastime works as a vehicle for personal growth.

Settling the Pop Score : Pop Texts and Identity Politics [Book Review]

Review(s) of: Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics, Stan Hawkins, Aldershot, Hants. : Ashgate, 2002, ISBN 0 7546 0352 0; pb, 234pp, ill, music exx, bibl. , discog. , index. The scholarly study of popular music has its origins in sociology and cultural studies, disciplinary areas in which musical meaning is often attributed to aspects of economical and sociological function. Against this tradition, recent writers have offered what is now referred to as ‘popular musicology’: a method or approach that tends towards a specific engagement with ‘pop texts’ on aesthetic, and perhaps even ‘musical’ terms. Stan Hawkins uses the term popular musicology ‘at his own peril,’ clearly recognising the implicit scholarly danger in his approach, whereby ‘formalist questions of musical analysis’ are dealt with ‘alongside the more intertextual discursive theorisations of musical expression’ (p. xii). In other words, popular musicologists dare to tread that fine line between text and context. As editor of the journal Popular Musicology Online, Hawkins is a leading advocate of this practice, specifically in the application of music-analytical techniques to popular music. His methodology attests to the influence of other leading figures in the area, notably Richard Middleton, Allan F. Moore and Derek Scott (general editor of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series in which this book is published).

Localising national identity : Albany's Anzacs

Local representations of the significance of Albany, Western Australia, in the first world war and of the city's part in the birth of Anzac register substantial points of departure from national histories. While both the Anzac mythos and official renderings of Australia's wars are vigorously contested, Albany's reformulation offers a clear example of the ways in which communities actively inflect national narratives to create expressions of differentiated local identity. This article explores the relationship between the national and the local by focusing on the local narrative of the massing and departure of'The Great Anzac Convoy' in King George Sound in 1914. Particular attention is given to the way Albany has been able to appropriate and localise this event and the origins of Anzac, consequently promoting itself as an important element of the national identity, from which it nevertheless remains distinct. This localisation of an important element of national identity confers cultural standing and a potentially empowered position in relation to this national identity.

A place in the sun : the politics of place, identity and branding

There is no doubt that place branding is a powerful and ubiquitous practice deployed around the globe. Parallel to its acceptance and development as a distinct discipline is an understanding that place branding as responsible practice offers the means to achieve widespread economic, social and cultural benefits. Drawing on work around place and identity in cultural geography and cultural studies, this paper engages critically with this vision. Specifically, it challenges the widely-held assumption that the relationship between place branding and place identity is fundamentally reflective, arguing instead that this relationship is inherently generative. This shift in perspective, explored in relation to current responsible place branding practice, is central to the realisation of place branding as a force for good.

Online Gaming in Context : the Social and Cultural Significance of Online Games

There is little question of the social, cultural and economic importance of video games in the world today, with gaming now rivalling the movie and music sectors as a major leisure industry and pastime. The significance of video games within our everyday lives has certainly been increased and shaped by new technologies and gaming patterns, including the rise of home-based games consoles, advances in mobile telephone technology, the rise in more 'sociable' forms of gaming, and of course the advent of the Internet. This book explores the opportunities, challenges and patterns of gameplay and sociality afforded by the Internet and online gaming. Bringing together a series of original essays from both leading and emerging academics in the field of game studies, many of which employ new empirical work and innovative theoretical approaches to gaming, this book considers key issues crucial to our understanding of online gaming and associated social relations, including: patterns of play, legal and copyright issues, player production, identity construction, gamer communities, communication, patterns of social exclusion and inclusion around religion, gender and disability, and future directions in online gaming.

Playing Pranks: Traditions, communities & co-creative cultural performance practice

Pranks, hoaxes and practical jokes are co-creative cultural performance practices that appear across times, contexts and cultures. These practices include everyday play amongst families, friends and coworkers, entertainment programs such as Prank Patrol, Punked or Scare Tactics, and aesthetic and activist pranks perpetrated by situationist artists, guerrilla artists, and, most recently, culture ‘jammers’ or ‘hackers’ intent on turning capitalist systems back on themselves. Although it can, in common usage, describe almost any show off behaviour, a prank in the strictest definition of the term is a performance that deploys a very specific set of strategies. It is an act of trickery, mischief, or deceit, that must be taken as real, and momentarily cause real fear, anger or worry for an unwitting spectator-become-performer, who is meant to play along until the trick is revealed and their response can be represented back to the prankster, other spectators, or society as a whole, either for the sake of entertainment or for the sake of commentary on a cultural phenomenon. A prank, in this sense, deliberately blurs the boundaries between daily and dramatic performance. It creates a moment of uncertainty, in which both the prankster’s ability to be creative, clever, or culturally astute, and the prankee’s ability to play along, discern the trick, discern the point of the trick, and, in the end, be duped, be a good sport, or even play/pay the prankster back, are both put to the test. In this paper, I consider a number of pranking traditions popular where I am in Australia, from the community-building pranks of footballers, bucks parties and ‘drop bear’ tales told to tourists, to the more controversial pranks of radio shock jocks, activists and artists. I use performance, spectatorship and ethical theory to examine the engagement between prankster, pranked spectator, and other spectators, in this most distinctive sort of community-driven performance practice, and the way it builds and breaks status, social and other sorts of relationships within and between specific communities.

Australian icons: Authenticity marks and identity politics

This article evaluates the adoption and implementation of an Indigenous certification trademark system in Australia. Section II considers the use of copyright law, moral rights provisions and consumer protection laws to protect Indigenous cultural property in Australia. It suggests that there needs to be additional protection under trademark law - especially to deal with problems concerning communal ownership, material form and duration of protection. Section III evaluates the efficacy of the scheme for marks of authenticity established by the National Indigenous Arts Advocacy Association in November 1999. It contends that there were practical problems with the implementation of the scheme and symbolic concerns about the definition of authenticity applied under the regime. Section IV engages in a comparative analysis of other jurisdictions - such as New Zealand, Canada and the United States. It demonstrates that an Indigenous certification mark can be successful, given sufficient support and assistance. The article concludes that there needs to be a sui generis system to protect traditional knowledge at an international level.

Disjecta: Material representations of an Indigenous and immigrant cultural legacy

This practice-led research explores family history and the on-going influence of cultural legacy on the individual and the artist. Homi Bhabha theorises that identity vacillates through society, shifting and changing form to create disjunctive historical spaces – spaces of slippage that allow for new narratives and understandings to occur. Using the notion of disjuncture that became apparent in this research, the practice outcomes seek to visualise my families' sometimes-occulted history at the intersection of euro-centric and Indigenous ideologies. Researched archival materials, government documents, interviews, collected objects and family photo-albums became primary source data for studio-based explorations. Scanners, glitch apps and photo-hacking were used to navigate through these materials, providing opportunities for photographic punctum and creating metaphors for the connections and disconnections that shape our sense of self.

Remaking Guangzhou: Geo-identity and place-making on Sina Weibo

This study uses the concept of 'place-making' to consider the formation of geo-identity on Sina Weibo, one of the most popular microblogging services in China. Besides articulating state-public confrontation during major social controversies, Weibo has been used to recollect and re-narrate the memories of a city, such as Guangzhou, where dramatic social and cultural changes took place during the economic reform era. This study aims to explore how Weibo sustains political engagement through maintaining Guangzhou people's sense of belonging to their city. By collecting data from a Weibo group over a period of twelve months, I argue that Weibo politics not only takes place during a contentious events, but is sustained within the realm of everyday life. This study has the potential to contribute to the limited knowledge of Weibo use during non-contentious period in China, hence broadening the notion of popular polity in the age of social media.

Theorising the impacts of digitally mediated social interaction on diasporic identity formation: A case of Chinese diaspora in Australia

With the scope of Chinese diaspora in Australia, this paper theorises the impacts of digitally mediated social interaction on diasporic identity formation in the new media landscape. People’s identity is the outcome of their social interactions with other individuals. In the new media landscape, digital media technologies are changing the way in which people communicate with others. On one hand, space and time are unprecedentedly compressed by media technologies so people can maintain more frequent and instant connections with others than before. On the other hand, the digital media technologies have constructed a virtual social space that might withdraw people from their physical social interactions. As we witness today, our social interactions are increasing digitally mediated, in the forms of posts and comments in social network sites, as well as the messages in social apps. As to the diasporic groups, this new media landscape is presenting a challenge to their identity formation. They physically live in the host countries but still keep close social and cultural connections with their homelands. Facilitated by digital media technologies, they are facing two platforms in which they can practice different identity performances: one is the digitally mediated social network; the other is the physical social network. In the case of Chinese diaspora, the situation is more complex due to the language factor and media censorship in Mainland China, which will be articulated in the main text. This paper aims to fill a gap between media studies and diaspora research. Most of existing research on the relationship between diasporic identity and media primarily focuses on the development of ethnic media institutions, and the production and consumption of ethnic media in the pre-digital media context. However, the process of globalisation and digital media technologies are increasing the homogeneity and hybridity of media content worldwide. In this new context, attributing the formation of different identities to the consumption of media content is arguable to some extent. Therefore, the overlapped area of new media studies and diaspora research still has space deserves further investigation.

Feminism and identity in the work of contemporary Iranian female artists

This practice-led project focuses on the Iranian context and the role of female Iranian artists using digital mediums to influence the social, political and environmental life of Iranian women. The exegetical component presents a discussion on the intersection between three theoretical areas of artistic practice in Iran; feminism, cross-cultural practice and digital image making. Particular concern to this study is the growing role of female Iranian artists in challenging the social status quo. This is conducted through an investigation of a number of Iranian female artists in the form of case studies and interviews and a discussion on the impacts of their work on the resulting creative practice portion of this study.

Shaping global teacher identity in a short-term mobility programme

This article explores the shaping of Australian and Malaysian pre-service teachers’ possible selves in a short-term mobility programme. With the theory of possible selves, individuals imagine who they will become based on their past and current selves. The focus of the research was on pre-service teachers’ possible selves as global and culturally responsive teachers. The experiential learning through participation in the programme allowed participants to consider their future possible selves as teachers with a deeper understanding of diverse learners’ needs and how they might strive to address these needs in their own classrooms. The scaffolding of reflections in the programme encouraged the pre-service teachers to take on multiple perspectives, to step outside their comfort zones and in many ways to see the world from different eyes. The research found that through experiential learning in the short-term mobility programme both the Australian and Malaysian pre-service teachers gained in positioning their cultural selves currently and as future teachers, suggesting that there is merit in utilising the theory of possible selves in future research in the area of shaping teacher identity.

Reconstituting identity and history in post-war Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina

This paper by Carl Grodach demonstrates the careful unravelling of complexity, diversity, contestation and contradictions involved in the reconstruction of symbolic urban spaces after violent conflict, and the allied processes of cultural reinterpretation, political reconfiguration and material revaluation which accompany it. The paper analyses the reconstruction and redevelopment of the 16th-century historic centre of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina, following the Bosnian Wars of 1992–1995. Reconstruction efforts centre around Stari Most, the 16th-century Ottoman bridge destroyed by Bosnian Croat military in 1993. In Mostar, both international and local organizations are in the process of reinterpreting Bosnia’s legacy of Ottoman city spaces. This research and analysis illuminates how such spaces can be central to contemporary projects to redefine group identities and conceptions of place. It provides insight into the ways various groups are attempting to reshape outside perceptions of the city—and Bosnia’s ethnic conflict—to articulate a new definition of local identity and ethnic relations and to remake a stable tourist economy through Mostar’s urban spaces.

Traces from elsewhere: Nomadism, artistic identity and contemporary dance in Ireland

This keynote presentation explores the connections between nomadism and artistic identity formation by interrogating the creativity that migration elicits and the narratives that surround it. It is further situated in the complex role that emigration has in Irish culture questioning whether contemporary dance in particular is emblematic of this socio-cultural phenomenon. These questions are anchored through descriptions of a creative project currently underway that draws together artists from Ireland and Australia to explore how we manage absence and presence in a globalized yet increasingly virtual world.

Literature, tourism and the city: Writing and cultural change

Today national and regional tourism organizations look to sophisticated cultural tourism programs to enhance the visitor experience for tourists of their particular city. Yet research indicates that a challenge exists in designing and implementing programs that take full advantage of a city’s historical and emergent literary cultures. In this paper we offer critical insights into how literary cultural heritage can foster the development of an integrated and dynamic approach and provide the experience sought by local and global tourists. International exemplars are cited together with an analysis of the Australian city of Brisbane that describes itself as a ‘new world city.’ The findings of our research show that programs that harness diverse literary cultures, rather than adhering to a single literary representation, are better equipped to build identity and thus extend cultural tourism potential.