Monash University Communications & Media Studies Podcast

Communications Seminar Series: Simone Murray

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:00:00 +1100

March 16 2009

‘Remix My Lit’: Towards an Open-Access Literary Culture

The publishing buzzword of recent times has undoubtedly been ‘open access’. But typically this has referred to scientific journal publishing, only recently expanding to include humanities research. This paper goes further in asking what might an open-access literary culture look like? Developments around online publishing, electronic-books, print-on-demand and digital libraries see publishers facing challenges on every side. How might publishers’ traditional role as gatekeepers of literary culture be similarly usurped in an environment characterised by networked books, wiki-novels and fictional ‘rip and burn’ practices? Outlining three exciting recent experiments in open-access literature, Simone Murray’s illustrated talk investigates what the digital future of literature might look like, and what its impact will be on writers, publishers and readers.

Dr Simone Murray is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University. Her research examines the interface of the book with other communications media, particularly via digital multiformatting of content. Her current research project focuses on the industrial substructures of book-to-screen adaptations of literary prize-winners, and how such research can combine book history, print culture and media studies perspectives. She is currently engaged in a three-year Australian Research Council Discovery project on the adaptation industry, titled ‘Books as Media: The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation’. The monograph arising from this research, The Adaptation Industry: The Cultural Economy of Literary Adaptation, is forthcoming from Routledge US in 2011.

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Negotiating the Sacred V: Chandran Kukathas

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 11:00:00 +1000

15 August 2008

Do children have interests?

Chandran Kukathas

It is widely held that children have interests that deserve protection, by the law, by the state, and by international conventions. But before we can consider the merits of different measures to protect children it is important to ask whether or not children do indeed have interests and, if they do, what these might be. In this paper I suggest that children do not have interests and therefore that, whatever protections they require must have some other basis than that of attending to their interests. I also suggest that they have many fewer claims to protection than is sometimes asserted.

Biographical note

Chandran Kukathas is Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics. He previously taught at the University of Utah, and was also for many years taught political theory at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He is the author of Hayek and Modern Liberalism (OUP 1989) and The Liberal Archipelago: A Theory of Diversity and Freedom (OUP 2003). He has also published widely on such topics as multiculturalism, immigration, freedom, equality, and global justice.

Negotiating the Sacred V: Siobhan McHugh

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 09:30:00 +1000

15 August 2008

Marrying out: Catholic/Protestant unions in Australia 1920s-70s

Siobhan McHugh

For over 150 years, until post-war migration diluted the mix, Australia was polarised between the majority Anglo Protestant Establishment and a minority Irish Catholic underclass. Religious differences reflected social and political tensions derived from colonial days and exacerbated by organisations like Freemasons, the Orange Lodge and Catholic secret societies. A self-imposed religious apartheid often saw Catholics go to Catholic schools, socialise in Catholic groups and work in traditional Catholic areas like the public service. Protestants likewise mingled mostly with their own, as a 1930s brochure, The Protestant’s Guide to Shopping in Rockhampton, hilariously demonstrates. Following the 1908 Ne Temere papal decree, religious and family protocols strongly discouraged inter-faith marriages – yet a quarter of Australian Catholics continued to marry ‘out’ until the late 1960s (Mol 1970). Such ‘mixed marriages’ often caused deep family divisions, from disinheritance to social exclusion. Children brought up in such marriages sometimes suffered a confused identity, not fully accepted by either ‘side’. The sectarian attitudes of the period no longer apply to Catholics and Protestants in Australia, but parallels can be drawn with post 9/11 attitudes towards Muslims – the new ‘Other’.

This paper is based on 42 oral histories of participants in a mixed marriage, children reared in one, or Protestant and Catholic clerics. The research will be the basis for a Doctorate in Creative Arts.

Negotiating the Sacred V: Lori Beaman

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:30:00 +1000

14 August 2008

Religious diversity and family matters: Polygamy and the limits of the law

Lori G. Beaman

Polygamy has been the topic of much debate and controversy in Canada and the United States in the past year, often making the news with dramatic events involving alleged child and woman abuse, police raids, and the deliberate ‘flaunting’ of illegal activities. How can we make sense of this seeming sudden attention to a family form that has existed relatively quietly for at least a century in communities across Canada and the United States?

Lori G. Beaman holds a Canada Research Chair in the Contextualization of Religion in a Diverse Canada at the University of Ottawa. Trained in sociology, law and philosophy, she brings an interdisciplinary perspective to her central research focus which is religious freedom and its regulation. Her books include Defining Harm: Religious Freedom and the Limits of the Law, _Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press (2008); _Religion and Canadian Society: Traditions, Transitions and Innovations, Toronto: Scholar’s Press (2006) and Religion, Globalization and Culture, edited with Peter Beyer, Leiden: Brill Academic Press (2007). She presents her work regularly at international conferences, and has published articles in numerous scholarly journals, including Nova Religio, Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion and Church and State.

Negotiating the Sacred V: Gary Bouma

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:30:00 +1000

14 August 2008

Religion and governing the family

Gary D. Bouma

All religions have images and ideals of the human family. These images and ideals range widely and are in no small part informed by social and cultural factors. For example, polygamy is more likely to emerge in societies with a high mortality rate among young males. Once in place, these images and ideals are likely to be given religious sanction – ‘God wants(ed) it thus’. A religiously plural society like Australia is likely to experience contestation between different religious groups as they seek to use the state to enforce their religiously sanctioned images and ideals. This is evident in the current debates about gay marriage and polygamy, the earlier debate about re-marriage of divorced persons, and debates about other aspects of family life from contraception and abortion to the provision of facilities suitable to couples in their senescence. In all of this it is the temptation, or in the case of some – e.g. Calvinists, Catholics and Wahabbi Muslims – the perceived requirement to use the state to impose on others the views of some poses a threat to the smooth functioning of democracy in a religiously plural society. There may also be situations where secularists impose their images and ideals upon others using the state.

Gary D. Bouma is Professor Emeritus of Sociology and UNESCO Chair in Intercultural and Interreligious Relations – Asia Pacific at Monash University and Chair of Board of Directors for The Parliament of the World’s Religions 2009. He is Associate Priest in the Anglican Parish of St John’s East Malvern. His research in the sociology of religion examines the management of religious diversity in plural multicultural societies, postmodernity as a context for doing theology, religion and terror, inter-cultural communication, religion and public policy, women and religious minorities, and gender factors in clergy careers. Recent books include: Australian Soul: Religion and Spirituality in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press) and _Democracy in Islam _(Routledge) which he has written with Sayed Khatab.

Note: this is an Enhanced Podcast that includes a slideshow with the audio. See this page for more information about enhanced podcasts and compatibility. If you are unable to play the enhanced version, an MP3 file without the slideshow is also available below.

Cosmopolitan Melbourne: Scott McQuire

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:00:18 +1100

28th March 2008

Public Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere

Scott McQuire (University of Melbourne)

Public space in 21st Century cities is increasingly shaped by interactions between media and architecture. The result is the formation of media-architecture complexes which are fast coalescing into ‘media cities’. The social implications of the new public spaces created at the intersection of media networks and material structures are highly ambivalent. New security and commercial agendas overlay older traditions of civic life. In a context where fear of strangers is frequently promoted as a strategy of political control, new media forms such as large public screens can play a critical role in promoting collective interactions in public space. However, facilitating cosmopolitan public culture demands strategic displacement of the flexible forms of power frequently deployed in the public spaces of contemporary cities. Drawing on research undertaken in Australia and the UK, this paper will argue that sites such as Melbourne’s Federation Square can take a strategic role in the contemporary formation of experimental ‘transnational’ public spheres.

Q&A Session

McQuire’s paper was followed by a question and answer session with the three presenters from this session - Scott McQuire, Jan Scheurer and Ian Woodcock.

Cosmopolitan Melbourne: Katie Fraser

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 11:00:00 +1100

28th March 2008

Steering Past Settlement: Cases from the African Legal Service

Katie Fraser (Footscray Community Legal Centre)

How does Melbourne’s social and cultural geography shape legal problems and unlawful behaviours? The western suburbs have long been a settling point for new arrivals; however, as gentrification continues and the inner west becomes unaffordable, new refugee arrivals from Sudan and Burma are being settled further out in the western suburbs. Here public transport links are less developed, and a private vehicle is essential for access to language classes, schools and other essential services. Driving without a license, driving with a suspended license, and driving without insurance are all inevitable consequences of this geographical imperative to drive. Such problems are compounded by certain public policy initiatives. For example, the Centrelink implementation of “welfare to work” policies pressures unskilled workers—including many refugees and other new arrivals—to take factory work, which tends to be available during time periods and at industrial locations not serviced by public transport. In these ways, policy, landscape and cultural differences combine to cause shame and high financial costs, creating barriers to settlement and barring the participation of some in “cosmopolitan” and “multicultural” Melbourne. Other social consequences include high costs on the road and the broader losses associated with social isolation. This paper will draw on evidence from the African Legal Service project, which has been run from the Footscray Community Legal Centre to provide legal advice services to African clients. It will examine geography as one of the barriers to social inclusion for new arrivals, and suggest ways in which spatial and cultural isolation can be overcome.

Cosmopolitan Melbourne: Kate Shaw

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 10:00:44 +1100

28th March 2008

Planning the ‘Creative’ City: Global Strategies and Local Creative Subcultures

Kate Shaw (University of Melbourne)

The ‘creative city’ concept has high political and symbolic importance for global cities seeking to attract jobs and investment. But the concept contains a well established dilemma: local creative subcultures, which feed city cultures, can be vulnerable to the gentrification that often results. Increasing land rents in Australian central cities are placing pressure on local creative initiatives, displacing small cultural producers and dispersing local networks.

Genuinely creative cities foster new ideas and practices and new uses of space, requiring that we plan for the unplanned. Some city governments are beginning to understand this, and are developing planning policies that can create the conditions for the continuity of their valued (and valuable) creative subcultural activities.

This paper examines the complex relationships between ‘creativity’ and place, and evaluates recent initiatives intended to nourish local cultural diversity. In identifying cases of best practice in Australia, and with reference to similar practices overseas, the research reveals an evolution in the range of regulatory and negotiating tools available to governments, and in public discourses around the maintenance of sustainable city competitiveness.

Q&A Session

Shaw’s paper was followed by a question and answer session with three of the presenters - Sally Capp, Morris Bellamy and Kate Shaw.

Music, Culture and Society Conference: Joel Crotty

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 12:15:00 +1100

Marketing Romanian Music Abroad (1948-1964): The Use of Totalitarian Language in Various Guises

Joel Crotty

This paper uses two sources that were marketed in the “West” – one was an official party propaganda newspaper, For a lasting peace, for a people’s democracy and the other an academic journal, Rumanian review, that on the surface appeared to be above the direct approach of a communist communiqué. A source from the West that represented a communist mouthpiece, the British-Rumanian Friendship Association’s British-Rumanian Bulletin,_ _has also been included to highlight the extent to which the Romanian authorities went to project its propaganda.

What was the language used? How was “socialist realism”, “cosmopolitanism”, “internationalism” expressed in musical terms? And how did the marketing of music change with the fluctuation of ideology? The period under review reflects an era in which communism had rapidly engulfed every aspect of Romanian life and the Party’s self-justification for societal domination needed both its own people and those abroad to be “educated” in the utopian vision. In terms of theoretical ballast the paper will use the work of Monika Kroupova and Victor Klemperer both of who have studied the totalitarian language from respectively the communist and Nazi “persuasions”.

Joel Crotty is currently the Associate Dean (Graduate Research) in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University. His research interests cover both 20th and 21st century art music of Australia and Romania. The Romanian focus at the current time is on the impact of the mid-20th century communist takeover in Romania on classical music. Aspects of this research were published last year in the Journal of Musicological Research. The projected Romanian investigations include ‘Composing Communism: the prismatic dimensions of memory in the post-communist era’ and a larger project tentatively entitled ‘Romancing culture in the borderlands, 1900-1965: The use of travel writings as a way of re-contextualising Romanian music’.

Music, Culture and Society: Shane Homan

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:40:00 +1100

7 March 2008

Pop in the City: Industries, Governance and Night-Time Economies

Shane Homan

Popular music plays an important role in the cultural life of many cities, as a key commercial entertainment option for residents and tourists, and as a particularly powerful means by which cities claim a competitive foothold in the ‘selling’ of a vibrant nightlife._ _The suburban or inner city rock pub, jazz restaurant or dance nightclub has always played an important role not just in the lives and careers of individual musicians, but in the life of cities. In the particularly Australian context that I will discuss here, live rock, blues and jazz venues have similarly assumed local and national importance as sites where communities are formed, performance skills tested, and reputations earned.

In this paper I consider the recent history of debates about the role of popular music in reconfigurations of the ‘civilised’ and ‘sophisticated’ city and the challenges in ensuring a diversity of nightlife and entertainment. Drawing on my recent involvement in music venue and liquor law reform in NSW, this paper also reflects on the ongoing politics of ‘cultural’ or ‘creative precinct’ conceptualisations of city music-making, and the desire for popular music to be contained within more orderly (gentrified) constructions of the night-time economy.

Shane Homan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies at Monash University. A rock drummer, he is the author of The Mayor’s A Square: Live Music and Law and Order in Sydney (Local Consumption Publications, 2003) and editor of Access All Eras: Tribute Bands and Global Pop Culture_ (Open University Press, 2006). He is co-editor with Tony Mitchell of the forthcoming anthology Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now: Popular Music in Australia (Australian Clearinghouse for Youth Studies, Hobart). He has engaged in a variety of Australian music industry and policy work, including the regulation of music venues and night-time economies.

Questions for all participants were taken at the end of this session. Download the questions in MP4 format or in MP3 format.

Music, Culture and Society: Chris Worth

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:40:00 +1100

7 March 2008

VU and Value: Canonising Popular Music

Chris G. Worth

The study of popular culture originated partly in resistance to scholarly investment in ‘elitist’ canonical texts at the expense of texts generated and/or consumed by ‘the masses’ or by marginalized social groups. There are, however, many processes at work which encourage the formation of certain kinds of canonicity within popular cultures themselves and also within academic discussions of widely circulated or marginalised cultural texts. Many such processes deploy notions of value and of judgement or taste, explicitly or inexplicitly, to serve the interests of those for whom canon formation is an exercise of and source of power. What are the elements that might be at issue in the formation of putative canons of ‘rock music’? I apply a grid of supposed markers of canonicity and value to the Velvet Underground’s music and its reception. Looking at the results of this thought experiment, I argue that explorations of notions about cultural persistence can in fact generate productive dialogical resistance to, for example, those kinds of critique that, with the best intentions, treat popular creative texts as short-lived commodities circulating in an aesthetic-free market economy.

Chris G. Worth is Director, Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics and Senior Lecturer, English, School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University.

Questions for all participants were taken at the end of this session. Download the questions in MP4 format or in MP3 format.

Music, Culture and Society: Peter Beilharz, Trevor Hogan, and Clinton Walker

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 11:00:00 +1100

7 March 2008

The Vinyl Age: Rock Music in Australia, 1945-1995

Peter Beilharz, Trevor Hogan, and Clinton Walker

This paper represents a work in progress. This project promises the first coherent narrative and thematic work on rock and the postwar period, especially the sixties , with reference both to content and context . Team members - Clinton Walker, Peter Beilharz, and Trevor Hogan - will offer vignettes of enthusiasms including the idea of cultural traffic between cities outside and inside Australia, picking up themes like patterns of performance, innovation, imperfect mimesis, music technologies, production, consumption and youth culture. What happened in these spheres in the antipodes? What made these experiences different, as well as common, and what are the remaining resonances of these stories?

Peter Beilharz attended Croydon High School and Rusden College, and after a short experience teaching high school went to Monash University, where he completed a doctorate on Trotskyism in 1984. He taught at Monash, RMIT, and Melbourne before replacing Agnes Heller at La Trobe in 1988, where he progressed from lecturer through to personal chair in 1999. In 1980 he co-founded the international journal of social theory, Thesis Eleven. Since 2002 he has been director to the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology at La Trobe. In the course of his travels Peter has been a visitor at Manila, Amsterdam, Chapel Hill, Mexico City, Sao Paolo and Tokyo and a visiting fellow at RSSS, ANU. He was Professor of Australian tudies at Harvard 1999-2000, and William Dean Howells Fellow at Harvard Library, 2002. He is a Faculty Associate in the Sociology Department at Yale. Peter has written or edited twenty books, including Labour’s Utopias (1992), Postmodern Socialism (1994), Transforming Labor (1994), Imagining the Antipodes (1997) and Zygmunt Bauman – Dialectic of Modernity (2002) and eighty papers.

Trevor Hogan is Senior Lecturer, Sociology Program, La Trobe, and Deputy Editor of the Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology. He is also on the Editorial Board of the journal Thesis Eelven.

Clinton Walker is an art school drop out and recovering rock critic who has published seven books on Australian music and cultural and social history, and written television documentaries and produced archival CD collections. His output includes: Inner City Sound (1982; re-released in the US in 2005, plus 2CD set); Highway to Hell (1994), the internationally best-selling biography of AC/DC’s Bon Scott; Stranded (1996); Football Life (1998), a personal history of grass roots Australian Rules culture; Buried Country (2001), the story of Aboriginal country music; and Golden Miles: Sex, Speed and the Australian Muscle Car _(2005). _Buried Country expanded to a documentary and 2CD set as well, while Walker co-wrote ABC TV’s hit 2001 rockumentary series Long Way to the Top and produced its Top 10 2CD soundtrack. He is currently working on a TV documentary series version of Golden Miles, with La Trobe University on the research project The Vinyl Age, and writing two new non-fiction (non-music-based) books.

Questions for all participants were taken at the end of this session. Download the questions in MP4 format or in MP3 format.

Music, Culture and Society: Peter Murphy

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:15:00 +1100

6 March 2008

Bob Dylan Ain’t Talking: One Man’s Vast Comic Adventure in American Music, Dramaturgy, and Mysticism

Peter Murphy

Bob Dylan is the Augie March of American music, a Bellovian character who is engaged in an endless relentless picaresque journey through the vast landscape of American music, adopting and readopting one musical character type after another, a wanted man pursued by his original fans, the egregious sixties protest generation, whose idolatry he reviles—a musical chameleon, evasive, shape-shifting, identity changing, metamorphosing, impugner of romantic authenticity. The talk explores Dylan’s mystic propensity not to talk, his preference for dramaturgical masks and theatrical collaborators, the disappearance of his original self (Zimmerman) and its replacement with an enigmatic persona—an astonishingly original impersonator-mimic whose unending touring is an emblem of a life that is a comic masterpiece where the aw-shucks sly humor of Huck Finn meets the allusive mercurial word play of Shakespearean drama meets a kind of Quixote-like misidentification of self, misunderstanding by audiences and a mysterious transcendentalist metaphysics that is a peculiarly American mix of Calvinist necessity, bohemian experimentalism and mystical disdain for messages. Please allow me to introduce you to the Augustinian Jew, the philosophical entertainer, the jokerman born out of time. He is one hell of a bunch of interesting guys.

Peter Murphy is Associate Professor of Communications at Monash University. He is co-author of Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism (2004) and author of Civic Justice: From Greek Antiquity to the Modern World (2001). His edited volumes include Agon, Logos, Polis (2000), Friendship (1998), and The Left In Search Of A Center (1996). Murphy is a Coordinating Editor of Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology (Sage) and an Associate member of La Trobe University’s Thesis Eleven Centre for Cultural Sociology.

Recording includes a reply from John Dickson.

Music, Culture and Society: Eduardo de la Fuente

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:40:00 +1100

6 March 2008

That Other Modern Musical Persona: John Cage and the Minimal Self

Eduardo de la Fuente

This paper is derived from a larger research project on twentieth century music/musicians that uses that musical tradition to think about dynamics in modern culture. In this paper, I draw on Christopher Lasch’s notion of the ‘minimal self’ to think about the compositional aesthetic of John Cage. Lasch argues that Cage, and his creative partner Merce Cunningham, were at the forefront of a post-1950 development in avant-garde art he terms the ‘minimal self’. The minimal self rejects the need for ‘self assertion’ associated both with Romantic expressivism and the rational control of aesthetic materials (for e.g., serialism in music). The aesthetic outlook in question cultivates a creative personality based around the themes of self-effacement and impersonality. Lasch sees the minimal self as stemming from a fundamental anxiety in modern culture regarding the self and its relationship to the non-self, with Cage’s ‘tossing of coins, consulting the I Ching and using a stopwatch to time performances’ reflecting a rejection of the aesthetics of ‘tension and release’ for that of ‘psychic oneness’. Lasch’s assessment is decidedly neo-Freudian. He describes the Cagean aesthetic project as a form of narcissism that seeks that ‘blissful feeling of oceanic peace’ that comes from re-fusion with the world at large. He suggests something similar occurs in New Age therapies and forms of spirituality that ‘seek the shortest road to Nirvana’.

My own analysis of Cage’s musical aesthetic begins with a consideration of his work, Indeterminacy, presented with David Tudor at the Brussels World Fair of 1958. I argue that Lasch is only partly correct in his depiction of Cage as the example par excellence of the composer as minimal self. I suggest the following additional considerations: firstly, that characterizing Cage as the purveyor of an aesthetic based ‘on the shortest road to Nirvana’ ignores the deep-seated asceticism and vocational impulse that underlies his approach to merging music with life; and, secondly, that the ‘cult of impersonality’, which Cage could be said to be emblematic of, is itself a product of modern culture’s obsession with an aestheticized self. Drawing on Max Weber’s typology of ‘religious rejections of the world’ as tending towards the ideal-typical extremes of ‘emmisary’ and ‘exemplary’ prophecy, I argue that Cage represents an avant-garde persona that employs a logic that might be termed ‘the charisma of impersonality’. As against the Faustian model of the creative person, as someone seeking transcendence through imposing their will on the world, the exemplary avant-gardist eschews seeking followers and appears to defy the modern ideology of ‘art for art’s sake’. I will argue, however, that in letting sounds be themselves and in withdrawing his personality from the creative process, Cage is employing an important alternative paradigm of modern creativity: the artist as mystical and detached; a prankster who is deadly serious; a teacher who teaches through exemplification; the leader who refuses to lead - in short, charisma through impersonality. I conclude by suggesting that this cultural type recurs in both modern ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, and represents an important variant of the modern creative self.

Eduardo de la Fuente teaches in the Communications and Media Studies program in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University. Since 2005, he has been a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, and Co-Convenor of the TASA Cultural Sociology Thematic Group. He has published articles on topics such as the aesthetics of social life, Romanticism in the social sciences, and the cultural dimensions of modernity in journals such as Distinktion, Thesis Eleven The Journal of Sociology, The European Journal of Social Theory and Sociological Theory. He has a forthcoming monograph (Routledge) on twentieth century music and the question of cultural modernity. He recently joined the Editorial Board of the journal Thesis Eleven.

Music, Culture and Society: David Roberts

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:00:00 +1100

6 March 2008

Reflections on Cultural Secularization

David Roberts

The paper reads the theme of the conference against the grain: instead of treating music as an integral part of modern culture, I want to examine the conception - prevalent since the Romantics - of music as standing apart from the other arts through its power as absolute music to express the infinite (E. T. A. Hoffmann) and mirror the universe (Schelling), that is, music’s power to be an aesthetic substitute for religion and philosophy.

The cultural secularization of the arts is examined with reference to Adolf Behne’s essay, Rebirth of Architecture and Hegel. The counter-movement against secularization is examined by reference to Proust and Wagner’s late essay, Religion and Art. In conclusion, I argue that cultural secularization is better understood as a dialectic of desacralization and resacralization, illustrated by a brief look at the ongoing significance of religious music in the twentieth century.

David Roberts is Emeritus Professor of German, Monash University, a former director of the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and co-editor of the social theory journal Thesis Eleven.

Music, Culture and Society: Joseph Borlagdan

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 14:07:00 +1100

6 March 2008

The Paradox of “Do-It-Yourself” in Unpopular Music: Power, Capital, and Social Relations Within a Local Music Community

Joseph Borlagdan

This paper examines the construction of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (DIY) values in music-making. The importance of agency and participation as existing outside of the mainstream field of music is argued to be part of a process of music production, consumption and distribution that cannot be simplified according to a ‘mainstream versus alternative’ model. This dichotomy is a persistent one, but investigation into a small music making community revealed that social actors situating themselves in opposition to dominant norms will engage in complex and contradictory ways within the music field. It is more useful to talk of a continuum of music production rather than clearly bounded

categorisations. To better conceptualise how this is negotiated within the milieu of social relationships, Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital as operating within a field of restricted cultural production will be used to explain how forms of sociality are organised around symbolic forms of music made for ‘art’s sake’. By applying this conceptual framework, struggles emerge in which music makers attempt to create their own self-determined autonomous space. Paradoxically, however, these moves towards independence are largely enabled and facilitated by the actor’s dependence on the social networks that constitute the field. The DIY ethic is therefore a misnomer of sorts that belies the inherently social and co-operative manner in which music is pursued against the grain of ‘the mainstream’.

Joseph Borlagdan joined NCETA in July 2007 as a Lecturer. He is currently working on a project exploring the cultural influences on alcohol use amongst young Australians. Prior to working with NCETA, Joseph lectured in the Sociology Department of Flinders University and the Communication School of the University of South Australia. His teaching background includes topics such as youth culture, consumerism, contemporary social problems, social identity and media studies. He has also contributed to research in the teaching and learning field. Joseph completed his PhD at Flinders University in 2005. His research examined the cultural and social context in which young people actively produce their own underground music community. Located within the field of cultural sociology his research interests include the sociology of young people, post-subcultural theory, and ethnographic research. Joseph also holds a Bachelor of Behavioural Science (Hons).

Music, Culture and Society: Dan Black

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:30:00 +1100

6 March 2008

Algo-Rhythm and Mello-dy: A Consideration of the Relationship between Technology and the Embodied Performance of Music

Dan Black

For some time, a distinction between musical performance and practices such as sound engineering, arranging, playback, and even computer programming has been becoming progressively more difficult to draw. Harmonies can be constructed on the fly using computer algorithms and arrangements can be generated in a random and evolving fashion in realtime by computer programmes, while original music is produced in a way which precludes its live performance and DJs win fame as virtuoso performers despite being unable to play or compose music in any traditional sense. This paper considers the evolution of technology, changes to ideas of originality and reproduction, and the phenomenology of physical performance to reach some tentative conclusions about the nature of musical performance today.

Dan Black is Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies, School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University. He has a BA(Honours) from Melbourne University and a Ph.D. from RMIT University, and has written for journals such as The Journal of Popular Culture, Fibreculture, and Continuum. His ongoing research interests focus on the relationship between the human body and technology. The impact of embodiment and our interactions with other human bodies on the design and use of technologies; attempts to simulate the human body using technological means; and the interplay between understandings of human life and technological artefacts are of particular concern in his current work.

Note:There are some technical glitches in this recording, which causes parts of the speech at the very beginning to be inaudible. We apologise for the error.

Music, Culture and Society: Lawrence Harvey

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:43:00 +1100

6 March 2008

Auditory City: Realising an Auditory Spatial Awareness

Lawrence Harvey

The role of the electroacoustic music studio and associated domains of practice have significantly transformed in recent years. Institutional studios were originally necessary to aggregate expensive equipment for a small body of expert users to undertake research in musical, technical and perceptual topics. However the democratisation of technology and widely available technical information has forced a shift in the focus of such sites of auditory production.

The SIAL Sound Studios were established in 2004 in RMIT University’s School of Architecture and Design. As the Studios are located in a school of spatial studies and not a traditional music or media arts school the research, teaching and cultural agenda pursued in the Studios has been developed to address a unique set of cultural, spatial and musical concerns. Research in the Studios is primarily situated in three domains: urban soundscape research and design, spatial sound concerts and acoustic design. This paper will report on a series of public performances and new work in urban-based electroacoustic performances and installations that addresses two of these domains.

In 2007 the Studios produced Auditory City, a pilot series of three events for the Arts and Culture Branch of the City of Melbourne. The aim of the series was to present a free series of spatial music concerts in the city using diverse locations: the local town hall and grand-organ, a laneway and a multi-channel soundscape system. Each of the performances used components of the Studios’ 40 speaker sound diffusion system and software, and involved collaboration with a solo performer. Extending this project is current practice-based research into large-scale urban soundscape systems for electroacoustic sound design. The paper considers the place of sound design in the experience of urban spaces and proposes how this type of work exemplifies the new cultural role that a studio can play in the auditory life of a city and its inhabitants.

Lawrence Harvey is a Senior Lecturer in the SIAL Sound Studios, School of Architecture and Design, RMIT.

Music, Culture and Society: Joanne Cummings

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:15:00 +1100

6 March 2008

Trade Mark Registered: Sponsorship, Brand communities and Neo-tribalism within the Australian Indie Music Festival Scene

Joanne Cummings

The paper investigates the relationship between corporate sponsors and Australian indie music festivalgoers at two festivals, Big Day Out and the Falls festival. It is argued that through their consumption of indie music festivals, the festivalgoers have become a ‘brand community’ or neo-tribe. I look at the impacts of branding and commercialisation on the festival scene through an examination of the use of corporate sponsors. It is argued that festivalgoers through their consumption of indie music festivals have become a ‘brand community’ or neo-tribe. Drawing a comparison to the American Vans Warped tour, it is further argued that the commercialisation of the festival scene ultimately impacts on the meanings created by the festivalgoers. I argue that this relationship can have advantages as well as disadvantages due to the blurring of the lines between the meanings created by festivalgoers and the ‘experience enhancement’ techniques used by sponsors and festival organisers.

Joanne Cummings recently completed a PhD in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Sydney. Her thesis involved an ethnographic study of Australian indie music fesivals. Her main areas of interest are youth culture, popular music festivals, the sociology of everyday life and the role of popular music in the construction of late modern identities.

Music, Culture and Society: Michael Bull

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:45:21 +1100

6th March 2008

Sounding Out Cosmopolitanism: iPod Culture and Recognition

Michael Bull (Sussex)

In this lecture I argue that iPod culture represents the antithesis of the ideal of the cosmopolitan citizen inscribed in Western culture, that cosmopolitanism increasingly resides in the content of users iPods. That users increasingly turn away from the complexities and contingencies of urban everyday life. iPod culture signifies the development of a new listening self that calibrates the personal use of sound to the desire of the user – iPod culture represents a culture in which individuals increasingly micro-manage their experience. The lecture will discuss the social ramifications of what I refer to as a hyper-post-fordist appropriation of social space.

Michael Bull is Reader in Media and Film at the University of Sussex and has written widely on sound, music and technology. He is the author of Sounding Out the City. Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life (Berg 2000), Sound Moves:iPod Culture and Urban Experience (Routledge 2007) and is co-editor of The Auditory Culture Reader (Berg 2003). He is also the founding editor of The Senses and Society Journal published by Berg. He was until recently a consultant to Portalplayer, California and is a core member of New Trends Forum, a European Thinktank funded by Bankinter, Spain.

This paper was recorded at the Music, Culture and Society conference on the 6th March 2008.

ECPS Conference: Jeffrey Alexander

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:00:32 +1100

19th December 2007

Performance and Cultural Pragmatics in Social Action

Jeffrey Alexander (Yale)

Jeffrey Alexander presents an overview of his current work on the role of performance and cultural pragmatics in social action. He leads a discussion about the fruitful interaction of contemporary cultural sociology and performance studies—and the place of dramaturgy, narrative, audience and performance in social inquiry.

Jeffrey Alexander is the author of The Civil Sphere (2006), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (2004 co-author), The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (2003), Neofunctionalism and After (1998), Fin-de-Siècle Social Theory: Relativism, Reduction and the Problem of Reason (1995), Structure and Meaning: Relinking Classical Sociology (1989), Action and Its Environments: Towards a New Synthesis (1988), Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War Two, Columbia University Press (1987), Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1982-83).

Today, Alexander is leading a team of researchers at Yale University dedicated to developing a ‘strong program in cultural sociology’. A preliminary version of Alexander’s work on social performance can be found in the volume he recently edited with Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge, 2006).

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The Greeks: Vrasidas Karalis

Thu, 03 May 2007 16:00:00 +1000

May 3rd 2007

Can ancient myths express modern politics: some comments on Theo Angelopoulos’ Ulysses Gaze

Associate Professor Vrasidas Karalis (Sydney)

Vrasidas Karalis is the author of Nikos Kazantzakis and the Palimpsest of History (Kanakis, 1995) and a number of translation-studies of books by Michael Psellos, Michael Doukas, and Leo the Deacon. He is also the translator of Patrick White’s Voss and A Cheery Soul into Greek.

The Greeks: Vassilis Lambropoulos

Thu, 03 May 2007 14:00:14 +1000

May 3rd 2007

Governance, Violence, and Justice in Modern Tragedy: on the 1946 tragedy 'Capodistrian' by Nikos Kazantzakis

Professor Vassilis Lambropoulos (Michigan)

Vassilis Lambropoulos is author of The Tragic Idea (Duckworth, 2006), The Rise of Eurocentrism (Princeton University Press, 1993), and Literature as National Institution (Princeton University Press, 1988).

The Greeks: Luis David

Thu, 03 May 2007 13:00:29 +1000

May 3rd 2007

The Reclamation of Classical Antiquity For Post-Modern Times

Associate Professor Luis David (Ateneo de Manila)

Luis David is editor of Budhi, the leading journal of ideas and culture in the Philippines.

The Greeks: Louis Ruprecht

Thu, 03 May 2007 11:00:44 +1000

May 3rd 2007

Modern shrines to an ancient muse: a religious history of the modern public art museum

Associate Professor Louis Ruprecht Jr. (Georgia State)

Louis Ruprecht is author of Was Greek Thought Religious? On the Use and Abuse of Hellenism, From Rome to Romanticism (Palgrave, 2002), Symposia: Plato, the Erotic and Moral Value (SUNY, 1999), Afterwords: Hellenism, Modernism and the Myth of Decadence (SUNY, 1996), Tragic Posture and Tragic Vision: Against the Modern Failure of Nerve (Continuum, 1994).

The Greeks: Peter Murphy

Thu, 03 May 2007 11:00:00 +1000

May 3rd 2007

Troy and Gallipoli: The Australian Myth of Foundation

Peter Murphy (Monash)

Peter Murphy is the author of Civic Justice (Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2001), coauthor of Dialectic of Romanticism (Continuum, 2004), and coeditor of Agon, Logos, Polis (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2001).