‘CHOU GAGS CRITICS IN BANDOENG or how the media framed Premier Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Conference, 1955

At the Asian-African Conference at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955, the world's press concentrated its gaze on Premier Zhou Enlai of the People's Republic of China. Premier Zhou's every gesture, interaction and statement was scrutinized for evidence that his motivations at Bandung were antagonistic to Western interests. This preoccupation with the motivations of the Chinese was, however, no new phenomenon. By 1955, literary tropes of the ‘Yellow Peril’ had been firmly established in the Western imagination and, after 1949, almost seamlessly made their transition into fears of infiltrating communist Chinese ‘Reds’.

The first half of this paper explores the historical roots of the West's perceptions of the Chinese, through the literary works of Daniel Defoe to the pulp fiction of Sax Rohmer's Dr Fu Manchu series, which ran from 1917 to 1959. It then examines how this negative template was mobilised by the print media at the height of the Cold War to characterize Premier Zhou Enlai, not only as untrustworthy, but also as antagonistically anti-Western. This reading of representations of Premier Zhou at Bandung, as well as the literary tropes propagated in support of eighteenth and nineteenth-century imperial expansion, exposes a history of Western (mis)interpretations of China, and sheds light upon the media network's role in constructing a Chinese enemy in the mid-1950s.

Deficient "disadvantage students" or media-savvy new meaning makers?: engaging new metaphors for redesigning classrooms and pedagogies.

Words work in powerful ways in the world. We work from and with an understanding that the ways we talk about people, places and practices matter. If this was ever in doubt, witness recent media reports of the 'attacks on America' and the aftermath of the 'war on terrorism': the world's people have been re-divided both metaphorically and materially in these phrases. Meaning is constructed in and through language as categories, metaphors, rationales, stories, and tropes (Game & Metcalfe, 1996) and, while these are just representations of ideas, practices and material events and circumstances (Hall, 1997), we nevertheless act on those meanings (Fairclough, 1989; Gee, 1999). For example, whether people are described as 'border crossers,' 'invaders,' 'nomads,' 'gypsies,' 'asylum seekers' or 'refugees' affects how they treated, what they can be and what they can do. And in education, whether it's the 'literacy hour' or 'catching children in the net' or reading 'recovery,' words are inevitably tied to programs and proposals for solutions. How the problems are described and defined are crucial in how decisions are made.

Orientalism and the Australian news media : origins and questions

The author draws on his expertise in Middle Eastern history and Western philosophical thought, presenting an ambitious chapter that traces the origins of orientalist discourse from the 18th and 19th century Europe to the beginnings of the Australian press. The chapter identifies the parallels between this discourse and the most contemporary representations of Islam and Muslims in the Australian news media. It documents that a key challenge for those working for the Australian news media is firstly to recognise the extent to which orientalist thought influences the reporting of Islam and Muslims and then to transcend the centuries-old view of this faith and its adherents as a threatening other.

From despotism to democracy : reporting Iraq's January 2005 election in the Australian and Middle Eastern print media

It is only in recent times that the magnitude of Ancient Mesopotamia’s contribution to language, agriculture, modern thought and urbane society has begun to be understood. Most relevant to this study is the governance of Mesopotamia’s early city-states by a political system that Jacobsen has termed ‘Primitive Democracy’ where “…ultimate political power rested with a general assembly of all adult freemen” (Jacobsen, 1977; 128). Yet, despite this, the coverage of Iraq in the Western media since its creation at the end of the First World War and particularly since the first Gulf War, has tended towards Orientalism (Said, 1978) by trivialising this nation and thereby reinforcing the hegemony of the West over the ‘backward, barbaric’ East.

This paper examines this issue further by comparing and contrasting the representations of the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005 in four of Australia’s leading daily newspapers (The Australian, The Courier-Mail, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald) with four Middle Eastern English language papers (The Daily Star from Lebanon, Andolu Agency and Dunya both based in Turkey, and the eponymous Kuwait Times). In essence, it finds that while the Australian media posits democracy as a Western concept and asserts a discourse of US hegemony, the Middle Eastern papers are more contemplative, focusing on the impact that this election could have throughout the region.

Media-independent knowledge representation via UMART : unified mental annotation and retrieval tool

Multimedia information is now routinely available in the forms of text, pictures, animation and sound. Although text objects are relatively easy to deal with (in terms of information search and retrieval), other information bearing objects (such as sound, images, animation) are more difficult to index. Our research is aimed at developing better ways of representing multimedia objects by using a conceptual representation based on Schank's conceptual dependencies. Moreover, the representation allows for users' individual interpretations to be embedded in the system. This will alleviate the problems associated with traditional semantic networks by allowing for coexistence of multiple views of the same information. The viability of the approach is tested, and the preliminary results reported.

"It's about freedom": contesting dominant representations of devout Muslim women in the space of the nation

Since September 11 there has been a rise of Islamophobia in Australian public discourse, matched by a growth of racialised attacks on visibly identifiable Muslims in public space. These cultural racisms have arisen in a context where Islamic religious signifiers and practices have come to be read as signs of fundamentalism, terrorism and threat to national political traditions and cultural values. In particular, the hijab has become a symbol of these tensions, with the veiled woman being read as the embodiment of a ‘repressive and fundamentalist religion’. However, as some Muslim and feminist scholars have proposed, these readings rob Muslim women of their ability to articulate the reasons why wear the veil or engage in gendered religious practices. This paper argues that this enacts a form of disembodiment, whereby Muslim womens’ ability to comfortably inhabit their bodies and assert themselves in the public sphere is limited. In particular the paper draws upon two case studies which express this disembodiment, whilst highlighting the counter-strategies that devout Muslim women are adopting to reinsert their bodies and narratives in the national frame. The first refers to the recent media backlash which followed a public lecture held at Melbourne University by Islamic organization Hikmah Way, where the audience was segregated along gender lines. The second draws upon interviews conducted with veiled Muslim women in Sydney, following the Cronulla riot. These interviews show how Muslim women are contesting dominant representations of the hijab in western popular discourse by recoding it as a signifier of religious and national identity, and as an expression of democratic freedom.