Skip to the content | Change text size

English - News & Events

Keep up-to-date about what is happening in English, and the exciting projects your colleagues are involved in. This RSS feed consists of text with links to current events, and occasionally pictures and PDF files. There will be no audio, video or other large files in this feed. It will be updated regularly with the latest news.

Click here for more newsfeeds and podcasts from our school

ECPS News Headlines

Click here for full news listing

August 2008

Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Danielle Wilde

4 August 2008

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

Danielle Wilde will discuss her current doctoral research into how technology might be paired with the body to poeticise experience (and what this might mean).

Primary aims of this 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, extended and extending interfaces through to “invisible”, embedded and distributed systems, which allow 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. Outcomes include wearable artefacts, performances, performance interventions and the development of interfaces for use by the general public.

Seminar jointly organised with ECPS Communications and Media Studies.

International and Intercultural Communications in the Age of Digital Media

11-13 August 2008

  • Within current understandings of globalization, it is difficult to think of any topic in the field of media and communications studies which does not consider the international and the intercultural as they function within digital media environments. Nevertheless, this diversity also raises interesting questions about what is central in the field.
  • What are the most pressing questions facing media and communications scholars today, and how are they shaped by the discipline’s international, institutional contours?
  • What does the desire to ‘de-westernize’ media & communications studies say about relations between the empirical and the theoretical; where we find examples of media cultures in action, and what ideas we use to make sense of them?
  • Is disciplinarity still a workable idea?
  • How do all of these questions work their way into studies that are not directly about any of them?
  • Or are these even the right questions to ask?

We invite you to consider these questions.

Film & Television Seminar Series: Tessa Dwyer

14 August 2008

Slashing and Subtitles: Romanian Media Piracy, Censorship and Translation

Romanian California Dreaming

Based on research undertaken in collaboration with Romanian national Ioana Uricaru, this paper focuses on media piracy in pre-1989 communist Romania involving the translation of banned foreign-language films and television programs. Noting how translation can function both in the service and subversion of censorship, and how both roles are complicated by contradictory notions of quality and authenticity, I begin by pitting Romania’s government-sanctioned translation methods against the unofficial, amateur practices that typify piracy operations. I then proceed to unpack and expand notions of media piracy to include niche, expert and online modes of engagement. It is my contention that the audiovisual translation techniques that accompany both censorship and piracy processes provide a largely unexamined angle from which to interrogate the politics of film exhibition, distribution and reception.

 

Negotiating the Sacred V: Governing the Family

Illustration: Painting by Elizabeth Burns Coleman

14-15 August 2008

Registration now open

This interdisciplinary conference will explore how ideas of the sacred inform our concepts of what the family should look like, how we relate to each other as family, and how these family structures are recognised, or fail to be recognised, in law and structures of governance. It seeks answers to questions about the appropriate role of the state in the governance of family. Themes include:

  • Representations of the family, marriage and gender roles in religious traditions
  • Recognition of religious law
  • Recognition of alternative family structures
  • Social justice and the rights of women and children
  • Health, reproduction and the family

Full details and registration at this link.

Communications Seminar Series: Peter Gerrand

18 August 2008

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

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.

Drama & Theatre Seminar Series: Fiona Gregory

18 August 2008

An Alternative Ophelia: Embodying Madness on the late-Victorian Stage

In 1897, audiences warmly welcomed Johnston Forbes-Robertson’s new interpretation of Hamlet to the London stage. His sane, intelligent prince was received as a pleasing departure from tradition. Mrs Patrick Campbell’s own experiments with the role of Ophelia in this production were not so welcome. Critics described her playing as “curiously weak” and “unconvincing and unimpressive.” Campbell had rejected the conventional model of the character as emblem of prettiness and pathos and instead offered a vacant, depressive, “beaten” Ophelia. This paper examines the influences behind this choice, including the actress’s own experience of mental illness and the notorious “rest cure” treatment regime. I read the reception of this performance in terms of contemporary attitudes to Ophelia and mental illness as well as responses to Campbell and her celebrity identity. In seeking to re-cast Campbell’s achievements in this role, the paper ultimately calls for a broader perspective in determining the constitutive elements of a performance event, and affirms the importance of careful consideration of the performer’s identity (personal identity, professional identity, celebrity identity) when analyzing the reception of past performances.

B for BAD Cinema Screenings: '4'

21 August 2008

Film still: '4'

Julia Vassilieva presents: '4' (Ilya Khrzanovsky, 2004, Russia)

Since communism collapsed in the mid nineties, “4” directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky and based on the screenplay by Vladimir Sorokin has become the first film to be censored in Russia. While the film has won a number of prestigious awards in the West, “4” has also provoked harsh criticism : “Though director Ilya Khrzhanovsky denies that his synopsis-proof first feature is a product of the Russian necrorealist movement – self-consciously inflammatory underground art, film and video that symbolises (or feasts upon) the putrefying corpse of the Soviet state – the startling “4” is nonetheless a howling orgy of decrepitude and decay.” (J.Win, Time Out London Issue 1831: September 21-28 2005) In her introductory talk “On the Political Power of Pro-filmic” Julia Vassilieva (Film and TV Studies, Monash University) examines the most controversial aspects of Khrzhanovky’s confronting footage.

 

Film & Television Seminar Series: John Conomos

28 August 2008

Mutant Media: Cinema, Video Art and New Media

Book cover: Mutant Media

John Conomos is a media artist, critic, and theorist who extensively exhibits both locally and internationally. His art practice cuts across a variety of art forms - video, new media, installation, performance and radiophonic art - and deals with autobiography, identity, memory, post-colonialism, and the “in-between” links between cinema, literature and the visual arts. He is a prolific contributor to local and overseas art, film and media journals and a frequent participant in conferences, forums and seminars. In 2000 he was awarded a New Media Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts. His recent book Mutant Media (Artspace/Power Publications, Sydney) collects his essays from over a 20-year period.

In his presentation, John will discuss issues arising from Mutant Media, illustrated with clips.

 

September 2008

October 2008

Other 2008

April 2009

Graphic: standard RSS feed icon Subscribe to this feed

 

English Podcast

Recent episodes from the English Podcast. Click here to view all episodes or subscribe.

Graphic: standard RSS feed icon Subscribe to this feed

 

English Studies

For...

Program Information