‘Live your liberation, don’t lobby for it’ : Australian queer student activists’ perspectives of same-sex marriage

One topic covered in Australian queer university student print media is the legalisation of same-sex marriage. The legalisation of same-sex marriage is currently generating much debate in Western queer communities. Same-sex marriage is legalised in some countries such as, Canada, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium. It has been outlawed in Australia and most states in the US. Campaigns continue to reverse these restrictions. Other countries, such as the UK and New Zealand allow same-sex civil unions, providing couples with the rights afforded to married couples. There is a range of research documenting queer communities’ attitudes towards this issue (for example Lannutti 2005; Clarke, Burgoyne and Burns 2006; Yep, Lovaas and Elia 2003; Wolfson 1993; Egan and Sherrill 2005). These studies document broad community views as well as those of community sub-sections. For example, Yip (2004) looks at the views of gay and lesbian Christians on same-sex marriage and Lahey and Alderson (2004) document the experiences of same-sex couples who have gotten married or who are waiting to get married. Philosophical analyses consider the legalisation of same-sex marriage in relation to, for example, liberalism, equal rights, liberation, queer theory, citizenship, history, activism, religious discourse and feminism (Ferguson 2007; Jordan 2005; Josephson 2005; Lipton 2006; Sullivan and Chauncey 2005; Riggs 2007). This paper explores Australian queer university student activist media’s representation of same-sex marriage, and the debates surrounding its legalisation. It examines a selection of queer student media from four metropolitan Australian universities, and the 2003 and 2004 editions of national queer student publication, Querelle. This paper uses discourse analysis of queer student activists’ media representations of marriage to investigate this issue in one specific context – metropolitan Australian universities. This paper thus contributes to the history of queer activism, documenting what one group of young people say about the legalisation of same-sex marriage, and furthers research on queer perspectives of marriage and same-sex relationships.

Recent Italian cinema : spaces, contexts, experiences

The book is an in-depth view of recent Italian cinema - bringing an interdisciplinary knowledge to the study of a complex cinema industry. The book aims to address a number of questions about Italian cinema of the last twenty years, bringing interdisciplinary knowledge to a cinema that eschews traditional definitions and categories, and challenges critical assumption about a film industry that is struggling to find a new direction. In doing so, Recent Italian Cinema offers a transverse analysis of the Italian cinema industry in its dealings with national and international production, and of the themes and issues that have emerged in films produced during the period 1980-2006.

Is Doctor Who Australian?

As part of an ARC Discovery project to write a history of Australian television from the point of view of audiences, I looked for Australian television fan communities. It transpired that the most productive communities exist around imported programming like the BBC’s Doctor Who. This program is an Australian television institution – and I was thus interested in finding out whether it should be included in an audience-centred history of Australian television. Research in archives of fan materials showed that the program has been made distinctively Australian through censorship and scheduling practices. There are uniquely Australian social practices built around it. Also, its very Britishness has become part of its being – in a sense - Australian. Through all of this, there is a clear awareness that this Australian institution originates somewhere else – that for these fans Australia is always secondary, relying on other countries to produce its myths for it, no matter how much it might reshape them.

Social scientists don’t say titwank’

Drawing on the textual evidence of a number of referees’ reports, this article maps key differences between the humanities and social sciences approaches to the study of pornography, in order to facilitate better understanding and communication between the areas. 1. Social scientists avoid ‘vulgar’ language to describe sex. Humanities scholars need not do so. 2. Social scientists remain committed to the idea of ‘objectivity’ while humanities scholars reject the idea – although this may be a confusion in language, with the term in the social sciences used to mean something more like ‘falsifiability’. 3. Social science assumes that the primary effects of exposure to pornography must be negative. 4. More generally, social science resists paradigm changes, insisting that all new work agrees with research that has gone before. 5. Social science believes that casual sex and sadomasochism are negative; humanities research need not do so.

Remediating vernacular creativity : photography and cultural citizenship in the Flickr photosharing network

Read through a focus on the remediation of personal photography in the Flickr photosharing website, in this essay I treat vernacular creativity as a field of cultural practice; one that that does not operate inside the institutions or cultural value systems of high culture or the commercial popular media, and yet draws on and is periodically appropriated by these other systems in dynamic and productive ways. Because of its porosity to commercial culture and art practice, this conceptual model of ‘vernacular creativity’ implies a historicised account of ‘ordinary’ or everyday creative practice that accounts for both continuity and change and avoids creating a nostalgic desire for the recuperation of an authentic folk culture. Moving beyond individual creative practice, the essay concludes by considering the unintended consequences of vernacular creativity practiced in online social networks: in particular, the idea of cultural citizenship.

Adventures in cyberformance

This thesis examines the new theatrical form of cyberformance (live performance by remote players using internet technologies) and contextualises it within the broader fields of networked performance, digital performance and theatre. Poststructuralist theories that contest the binary distinction between reality and representation provide the analytical foundation for the thesis. A critical reflexive methodological approach is undertaken in order to highlight three themes. First, the essential qualities and criteria of cyberformance are identified, and illustrated with examples from the early 1990s to the present day. Second, two cyberformance groups – the Plaintext Players and Avatar Body Collision – and UpStage, a purpose-built application for cyberformance, are examined in more detailed case studies. Third, the specifics of the cyberformance audience are explored and commonalities are identified between theatre and online culture. In conclusion, this thesis suggests that theatre and the internet have much to offer each other in this current global state of transition, and that cyberformance offers one means by which to facilitate the incorporation of new technologies into our lives.

Audience and Market Foresight Trends and Foresight in Digital Media

This report provides an overview of trends in digital media over the period from 2009-2015. It applies scenario analysis to provide foresight on macro trends in the economy, politics, society and culture that will impact upon digital media market development in Australia, and the prospects for growth in online and digital media industries. It considers developments in the diffusion of innovations in advertising and marketing, mobile media, user-created content, and legal issues for consumers engaging in online transactions.

Democracy, participation and convergent media : case studies in contemporary online news journalism in Australia

The shift from 20th century mass communications media towards convergent media and Web 2.0 has raised the possibility of a renaissance of the public sphere, based around citizen journalism and participatory media culture. This paper will evaluate such claims both conceptually and empirically. At a conceptual level, it is noted that the question of whether media democratization is occurring depends in part upon how democracy is understood, with some critical differences in understandings of democracy, the public sphere and media citizenship. The empirical work in this paper draws upon various case studies of new developments in Australian media, including online- only newspapers, developments in public service media, and the rise of commercially based online alternative media. It is argued that participatory media culture is being expanded if understood in terms of media pluralism, but that implications for the public sphere depend in part upon how media democratization is defined.

Produtzung : Von medialer zu politischer Partizipation

Wahrscheinlich war es ja nur ein Versuch einer alteingesessenen Institution der Massenmedien, sich bei „den Leuten, die man früher ‚das Publikum‘ nannte“ („the people formerly known as the audience“; Rosen, 2006, n.pag.) wieder einzuschmeicheln. Dennoch, die Anerkennung des kollektiven „You“ in YouTube und anderen kollaborativen Onlineplattformen als Person des Jahres durch das amerikanische Magazin Time (Grossman, 2007) liefert ein weiteres Indiz für die wachsende Bedeutung solcher Projekte zur gemeinschaftlichen Produktion und Distribution von Inhalten. Kreative Websites wie Flickr und YouTube, kollaborative Wissenssammlungen von Wikipedia über Digg bis zu Google Earth, nutzergesteuerte Diskussionen in Slashdot, OhmyNews, und der allgemeinen Blogosphäre, aber auch die Softwareentwicklungsgemeinschaften im Open‐Source‐Bereich – sie alle dienen als Beispiele für diese nun etablierten Trend zur Entwicklung neuer Produktions‐, Geschäfts‐, Gemeinschafts‐ und Selbstlenkungsmodelle, die wesentlich durch zunehmend komplexere Web‐2.0‐Tools unterstützt werden. Hinter diesen Beispielen wird eine allgemeiner Tendenz sichtbar, die aus ökonomischer Sicht bereits von Yochai Benkler als „commons‐based peer production“ (2006), und von Eric von Hippel als „democratizing innovation" (2005) beschrieben worden ist. Henry Jenkins spricht zudem von einer „convergence culture“ (2006), in der solche nutzergesteuerten Projekte operieren, und es können auch Verbindungen zwischen diesen stärker aktive gewordenen Nutzern und Alvin Tofflers professionellen Konsumenten, den „Prosumers“ ziehen (1971).

Rethinking youth cultures : the case of the 'Gothics'

This paper has argued that subcultural social formations, such as the Gothics, did not evolve as resistance to a dominant culture. Instead, they are a response to the governmental construction of youth as an object of knowledge—the by-product of particular forms of government, generated by specific power/knowledge relations. Accordingly, attempts to account for the phenomenon of ‘subcultures’ should begin, not with notions of a shared, resistant class/generational consciousness, but rather with detailed investigations of specific forms of government, such as those involving conventions and customs within the fashion and music industries, the distribution of technologies of marketing and consumption, the adoption of various techniques of self-shaping, the prevalence of different journalistic practices, routines of policing, and so on. ‘Subcultural style’ is not an expression of relationship between a given social class, its material conditions and its economic and cultural aspirations. Rather, it constitutes the construction of particular habitus, shaped by fashion and leisure activities, through which certain youthful personae are given their form.

Identity, relationships and culture

The purpose of this paper is to consider contemporary developments in the knowledge area dealing with culture, relationships and individual identity. It has three main objectives: the first is to examme the ways in which knowledge is currently produced within the discipline; the second is to look at an alternative approach to the issues, an approach which stresses more piecemeal and contingent ways of understanding; finally, this paper looks at how this new theoretical knowledge is being applied, or can be applied, to areas which impact directly upon educational practices.

Between flagged borders, across gendered lands : the voiceless female space in contemporary representations of Australian beach

International and national representations of the beach perpetuate normative female concepts by maintaining dominant masculine myths, such as that of the heroic lifesaver and tanned sunbaker. Female experiences on the beach are traditionally associated with rhetorics of danger and peril, contrasted to the welcomed and protective gaze of the beach male. Conventional understandings of the gaze promote male surveillance of women, and although some resistance exists, the beach primarily remains a place to observe the female form. This article attempts to explore currents of resistance at the beach through a self-reflexive examination of Schoolies. Although the event is fixed within patriarchal codes and structures, small eddies of resistance exist amongst female participants in light of increasing awareness of masculine hegemony. The Australian beach remains a contested site of multiple constructs of gender and national identity. This article reveals the changing tides of resistance.

Assessing organizational culture? value management to the rescue

As part of a Doctor of Business Administration degree programme jointly run by Curtin University, Perth, Australia and Lingnan University, Hong Kong, a research thesis relating organizational effectiveness to the organizational culture of Hong Kong construction firms involved in public housing is being undertaken. Organizational effectiveness is measured by the Housing Department (HD) Performance Assessment Scoring System (PASS) and organizational culture traits and strengths have been measured by using the Denison Organizational Culture Survey (OCS), developed by Daniel Denison and William S. Neale and based on 16 years of research involving over 1,000 organizations. The PASS scores of building contractors are compared with the OCS scores to determine if there is any significant correlation between highly effective companies and particular organizational strengths and traits. Profiles are then drawn using the Denison Model and can be compared against ‘norms’ for the industry sector on which the survey has been carried out. The next stage of the work is to present the results of the survey to individual companies, conduct focus group interviews to test the results, discover more detail on that company’s culture and discuss possible actions based on the results. It is in this latter stage that certain value management techniques may well prove very useful.

Creative Commons : fair to share?

This article explores new the realities of the permissions culture and “all rights reserved copyright” in the networked environment and poses the question: why is lending a copy of a book sharing but emailing a PDF of it piracy? It explores new approaches to publishing and distribution of books by highlighting two books in the Aduki Independent Press catalogue. It was modeled on a presentation delivered by Elliott Bledsoe at the Changing Climates in Arts Publishing forum run by Artlink and the Copyright Agency Limited in Adelaide, Australia on 9 May 2009 and in Sydney, Australia on 27 June 2009.