The remediation of the personal photograph and the politics of self-representation in digital storytelling

Over the past couple of decades, the cultural field formerly known as ‘domestic’, and later ‘personal’ photography has been remediated and transformed as part of the social web, with its convergence of personal expression, interpersonal communication, and online social networks (most recently via platforms like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter). Meanwhile, the Digital Storytelling movement (involving the workshop-based production of short autobiographical videos) from its beginnings in the mid 1990s relied heavily on the narrative power of the personal photograph, often sourced from family albums, and later from online archives. This paper addresses the new issues arising for the politics of self-representation and personal photography in the era of social media, focusing particularly on the consequences of online image-sharing. It discusses in detail the practices of selection, curation, manipulation and editing of personal photographic images among a group of activist-oriented queer digital storytellers who have in common a stated desire to share their personal stories in pursuit of social change, and whose stories often aim to address both intimate and antagonistic publics.

No right to live? Malaysia’s Islam and implications for its sexual minority storytellers

This paper discusses the fast emerging challenges for Malay and Muslim sexual minority storytellers in the face of an aggressive state-sponsored Islamisation of a constitutionally secular Malaysia. I examine the case of Azwan Ismail, a gay Malay and Muslim Malaysian who took part in the local ‘It Gets Better’ Project, initiated in December 2010 by Seksualiti Merdeka (an annual sexuality rights festival) and who suffered an onslaught of hostile comments from fellow Malay Muslims. In this paper, I ask how a message aimed at discouraging suicidal tendencies among sexual minority teenagers can go so wrong. In discussing the contradictions between Azwan’s constructions of self and the expectations others have of him, I highlight the challenges for Azwan’s existential self. For storytellers who are vulnerable if visible, the inevitable sharing of a personal story with unintended and hostile audiences when placed online, can have significant repercussions. The purist Sunni Islam agenda in Malaysia not only rejects the human rights of the sexual minority in Malaysia but has influenced and is often a leading hostile voice in both regional and international blocs. This self-righteous and supremacist political Islam fosters a more disabling environment for vulnerable, minority communities and their human rights. It creates a harsher reality for the sexual minority that manifests in State-endorsed discrimination, compulsory counselling, forced rehabilitation and their criminalisation. It places the right of the sexual minority to live within such a community in doubt. I draw on existing literature on how personal stories have historically been used to advance human rights. Included too, is the signifance and implications of the work by social psychologists in explaining this loss of credibility of personal stories. I then advance an analytical framework that will allow storytelling as a very individual form of witnessing to reclaim and regain its ‘truth to power’.

Work and the Welfare State : Street-Level Organizations and Workfare Politics

Work and the Welfare State places street-level organizations at the analytic center of welfare state politics, policy and management. This volume offers a critical examination of efforts to change the welfare state to a workfare state by looking at on-the-ground issues in six countries: the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands.

Trade in 'Dirty Air' : carbon crime and the politics of pollution

‘Carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90% of all market activity in some European countries, with criminals pocketing billions, mainly in Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland, according to Europol and the European law enforcement agency.’ (Mason, 2009). ‘Carbon offset projects often result in land grabs, local environmental and social conflicts, as well as the repression of local communities and movements. The CDM approval process for projects allows little space for the voices of Indigenous Peoples and local communities – in fact, no project has ever been rejected on the grounds of rights violations, despite these being widespread’. (Carbon Trade Watch, 2013)

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).

Book review : "Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship by Claire Bishop"

In the years since Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998) was published, a plethora of books (Shannon Jackson’s Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics [2011], Nato Thompson’s Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991–2011 [2011], Grant Kester’s Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art [2004], Pablo Helguera’s Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Material and Techniques Handbook [2011]), conferences and articles have surfaced creating a rich and textured discourse that has responded to, critiqued and reconfigured the proposed social utopias of Bourriaud’s aesthetics. As a touchstone for this emerging discourse, Relational Aesthetics outlines in a contemporary context the plethora of social and process-based art forms that took as their medium the ‘social’. It is, however, Clare Bishop’s book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso), that offers a deeper art historical and theoretically considered rendering of this growing and complicated form of art, and forms a central body of work in this broad constellation of writings about participatory art, or social practice art/socially engaged art (SEA), as it is now commonly known...

Digital Spring? New media and new politics on the campus

Whilst the dynamics informing processes have taken time to become clear, civic resistance initiated by young people using new media began in Egypt in 2010 against the Mubarak regime, soon widened to Tunisia, Yemen and Libya. Known as the 'Arab Spring', this phenomenon re-ignited discussion about the political role of digital space and its democratic potential. While parallels between authoritarian regimes and universities and educational institutions might seem overdrawn to some readers, I suggest there is value in considering the 'Digital Spring' (apropos the 'Arab Spring') as a metaphor to suggest the possibility that similar processes are taking place in schools and universities. This invites discussion about the political significance of digital space and its democratic potential in those institutions. To assess how some young people engage in digitally mediated politics within schools and universities, I identify five propositions which amalgamate descriptive and normative elements derived from Habermas and Dahlgren. These propositions offer an ideal taxonomy of normative and descriptive elements to establish whether digital technology promotes participation and debate in ways that sustain democratic practice.

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.