'Fixers, the people behind the foreign correspondents'

They do the leg work for foreign correspondents who arrive in a new place and have to get on top of a story quickly, but rarely receive public acknowledgement for their work. Fixers can shape who you speak to and what angle you take on a story, as well as the logistics of making it all happen.

Foreign correspondents and international newsgathering: the role of fixers

This book reveals that ‘fixers’—local experts on whom foreign correspondents rely—play a much more significant role in international television newsgathering than has been documented or understood. Murrell explores the frames though which international reporting has traditionally been analysed and then shows that fixers, who have largely been dismissed by scholars as "logistical aides", are in fact central to the day-to-day decision-making that takes place on-the-road. Murrell looks at why and how fixers are selected and what their significance is to foreign correspondence. She asks if fixers help introduce a local perspective into the international news agenda, or if fixers are simply ‘People Like Us’ (PLU). Also included are excerpts from interviews with TV correspondents and fixers and in-depth case studies of correspondents in Iraq and Indonesia.

Digital shimmer: popular music and the intimate nexus between fan and star

Conception of ‘star performance’ through popular music is stratified which generates diverse and often contradictory forms of thought. For example, stars and celebrities plausibly act as a ‘culture medium’ in which, through imagination, one’s identity is assembled, realised or constructed. What to become and how to be are questions we individually and collectively contend with throughout our lives to varying degrees (Maslow, 1954; 1968). Predominant use of digital technologies has seen the delivery of sound much altered. Music, be it Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata or Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast, once sourced via analogue legacy devices such as ‘old-school’ tape cassette or vinyl record is now a series of zero and one digits. Advocates argue that the key benefit of digitalisation is the ability to compress data because sound generates large files of information. The discourse of digitalisation begs the question of how a series of ones and zeros, albeit in a plethora of configurations, registers with listening bodies and affects ‘the sublime’. It is without doubt that some musical experiences afford indescribable, unlocatable sensation—even enchantment (as defined by Bennett, 2001: 5 and called forth by Redmond: 2014: 126). Such musical experiences might be in the presence of the performer or in their absence such as in the case of recorded music. In this context, any sense of ’real’ space and place is less definitive allowing for ‘special encounters’ to be imagined and felt. For these reasons, music and all that the use of the word might convey, the proposed notion of phaino-ken here, acts as the lens through which to examine the meaning and value of celebrity and star embodiment.

Popular imperialism, Scottish identity, and William Wallace in an Australian colonial city

The narrative of William Wallace holds a prominent position in the current conception of England as a negative referent for Scotland’s national identity—its binary “Other”, against which Wallace valiantly fought. This article considers a contrasting understanding of Scottish national identity from the late-nineteenth century, and explores the events surrounding the unveiling of a statue of William Wallace in Australia during the year of 1889. It illuminates how settlers interpreted this national hero in such a way that demonstrated loyalty to the Union and Empire, and accommodated a convergence of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh migrants in a British colonial city. The article highlights how statues, the ceremonies surrounding them, and their public reception help us to investigate the symbolic, ritualistic, and performative dimensions of identity formulation. It considers how public monuments, providing a sense of authority to particular groups, can marginalise others by acting to settle cultural competition, and will reflect on competing interpretations of the statue at its unveiling.

Tim Winton: the literary and the popular

An exploration of the fiction of Australian author Tim Winton, investigating his popular and literary appeal.

Still in the LEGO (LEGOS) room : female teachers designing curriculum around girls’ popular culture for the coeducational classroom in Australia

While the issue of boys’ dominance of the curriculum has a long history, the article examines this phenomenon in a contemporary context, through an empirical study with female teachers designing English curriculum around girls’ media in a coeducational secondary school in Victoria, Australia. In this space, teachers, and the researcher, produce and perform both individual gendered identities and plans for the identities of future student subjects, while negotiating subject positions made available to girls and women in broader social contexts. In this instance, negotiations that take place during the development of a unit of work on Mattel's Barbie website form the basis of feminist discourse analysis, enabling us to ‘take stock’ in thinking about what curriculum design is, about where the past is situated in relation to the present, and to question why, within a discursive feminist/postfeminist entanglement, the heritage of feminist intellectual thought in this area seems absent.