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Communications and Media Studies Research Seminar Series Semester 2, 2008

Previous Communications seminars and events may be found at the following links, including links to podcast recordings of some presentations:

14 July

Professor Douglas Kirsner (Deakin)

Bias and Culture: Reforming the ABC

Burchill Room (Clayton Campus, Performing Arts Complex Bld.68), 2:00 to 3:30 PM

Cultural issues go to the root of what is wrong with the ABC. The major problem is the conformist culture of the institution. The fact that the one program on the ABC that challenges the orthodoxy by exploring conservative and liberal views is called ‘Counterpoint’ tells the story of the ABC’s virtual political monoculture. A cultural and value perspective sets it far apart from the major political parties and most of the Australian population. Katherine Betts has termed a ‘new class’ whose object was not old wealth but instead ‘the Australian mass, and its materialism, racism, sexism, and insularity’. The ‘knowledge-class’, which includes ABC journalists, is an important segment within the new educated class who have more distinct values that increasingly set them apart from business and the general community. Examples will be given with comparisons with the BBC. Cultural change in the ABC is essential for it to fulfill its own charter of balance, impartiality and diversity.

4 August

Danielle Wilde (Monash)

Swing that Thing : an investigation into how technology might be paired with the body to poeticise experience (and what this might mean)

Room 226 (Clayton Campus, Performing Arts Complex Bld.68), 6:00 to 7:30 PM

Danielle Wilde is an artist and design researcher based in Melbourne, Australia, and a doctoral candidate at Monash University Faculty of Art and Design and the CSIRO Division of Textile and Fibre Technology in Belmont, near Geelong (part of the CSIRO Division of Materials Science and Engineering). Danielle will discuss her doctoral research and will raise the challenges of developing performance with interactive wearable interfaces. Primary aims of Wilde’s doctoral research include understanding how one might incite people to move and extend themselves physically; the value of a direct consideration of the body’s tendencies and affordances when creating interactive body-centric elements and systems; the value of visceral experience and full-body, or ‘beyond limb-and-digit-triggered’ interaction; the idiosyncratic nature of relationships to the body and technology; and provoking, inciting or inspiring reflection about these relationships through the creation of wearable works of art, design and performance. Related projects include highly visible, ex-tended and extending interfaces through to “invisible”, embedded and distributed systems, which al-low the wearer to actuate and control changes in sound, colour, light, shape and form. The research builds upon more than ten years of experience pairing interactive technology with the body, with a particular emphasis on performance and performativity.

Seminar jointly organised with the Centre for Drama and Theatre Studies. View the DTS seminar series program here.

18 August

Peter Gerrand (Melbourne)

The global reach of Spain’s regional diasporas, and their modern reframing as supranational identities

English Library (Clayton Campus, Menzies Building, W710), 2 to 3.30 pm

Seminar jointly organised with Spanish Studies.

The geographical reach of the Spanish diaspora is surveyed, using as data the names and locations of more than 1,000 emigrant centres registered with Spain’s governments. The names of the centres, created as grass-roots initiatives since the 1840s by groups of Spanish emigrants, reflect the prime identification of the emigrants with their ethnic home region in Spain rather than with their Spanish nationality. The historical evidence for the destinations of the emigrants from different regions of Spain is consistent with the locations of the surviving centres, populated by their descendants.

Since 1985 several regional governments of Spain – those of Andalusia, the Asturias, the Canary Islands, Catalonia, Euskadi (the Basque Community), Galicia, La Rioja and Navarra – have implemented policies to build enduring links with their diasporas. Several have put em-phasis on ‘extra-territorial’ ethnic identity such as asturianía, catalanitat, isleñidad, euskal-tasuna and galeguidade via legislation, proclaiming annual days for international celebration, organizing international conferences for their global ‘collectivities’. All have subsidised cultural programs in their emigrant centres abroad, and many have subsidised reverse emigration.

The most successful achievement to date in winning recognition for supranational cultural identity has been the award of the ‘.cat’ top level Internet domain in 2005 for worldwide Catalan language and culture. This has stimulated the Galicians and the Basques (as well as the Bretons, Welsh and Scots) to follow a similar path for enhancing the online prestige of their languages and cultures. But the examples of the Andalusians, the Asturians, the Canary Islanders, the Navarrese and the Riojans – most of whom speak Spanish as their mother tongue – demonstrates that the modern regional trend in Spain to support a supranational ethnic identity does not depend upon strong differentiation by language from the dominant Castilian.

15 September

Michael Walsh (Monash)

Musical Listening in Context: Observations and Reflections on the Practice of Musical Listening

Berwick Campus, Building 901 Room 235, 2:00 to 3:30 PM

This paper presents some preliminarily data emerging from my doctoral research concerning the social study of musical listening in contemporary spatial environments. The paper illustrates through an analysis of interview transcripts the often essential role listening to music plays in accompanying listeners throughout a variety of social situations. The paper therefore attempts to show the varied nature of musical listening and how it is divergently practiced in relation to a number of social spaces (i.e. in the home, in transit and at work). Through considering these issues, the paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of exploring musical listening and the implications this then has for our experience of musical culture throughout everyday life.

13 October

Geoff Boucher (Deakin)

After the Subversive Paradigm: Notes toward a Communicative Theory of Literary Discourse

Caulfield Campus, Building K Room 212

In this paper, I propose that the currently dominant paradigm of literary inquiry – the subversive paradigm of, for instance, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism – is beginning to break up. This is because it originates as a subversive response to the project of state sponsorship of cultural development in the postwar era, and depends on a politics of interest that results in persistent normative deficits. But what sort of epistemology might respond today to cultural concerns raised by globalisation in a way that is able to reflexively justify its ethical stance? To respond, I turn to recent efforts to reconstruct the aesthetic theory of the second generation of the Frankfurt School, especially in the work of Habermas and Wellmer. In Habermas, aesthetics is marginalised by the predominance of theoretico-practical concerns, where the centrality of an argumentative model of communicative rationality sidelines the world-disclosing function of language. Additionally, an expressive conception of aesthetics implies that literary works make no discursive contribution to the public sphere. However, Pieter Duvenage and Lambert Zuidervaart have returned to the original Habermasian insight into the importance of the republic of letters for the public sphere. In the light of Wellmer’s criticisms of Habermas, they combine a theory of discursive language with a theory of world disclosure, to propose a reconstruction of communicative aesthetics. Yet Duvenage and Zuidervaart’s proposals do not amount to an interpretive methodology. Secondly, the promised link between aesthetics and ethics appears on the horizon of this project but remains unformulated within it. To rectify this gap I turn in the final section of the paper to explore the potential of Bakhtin’s dialogism for communicative aesthetics. I ask whether, once we take Wellmer’s reconstruction of speech act theory into account and we therefore reject Habermas’s strict separation between validity claims, a Bakhtinian approach cannot link together discursive language, world disclosure and engagement with the public sphere.