ABSTRACT Wet and Messy (WAM) is a sexual fetish that involves the use of food, water or other messy items and has a number of elements in common with bondage-discipline, domination-submission, sadomasochism (BDSM). WAM pornography contains elements associated with slapstick comedy as well. In this article I illustrate how Williams’ work on pornography, Peacock’s work on slapstick comedy and Hills’

ABSTRACT The remnants of the industrial era exist in the margins of our cities. This article explores the ruins of a once ‘iconic’ building and the forms of graffiti which were found there, revealing insights into relationships to the built environment, memory, the fragility of capitalism and the transient forms of expression which are found in these abandoned spaces communicating an imbalance in our

ABSTRACT In his study of graphic memoirs, Andrew Kunka discusses some of the problems of classifying autobiographical comics because the genre includes text and drawn images. He argues that ‘representing events in comics form seem more overtly subjective because stylistic representations are so clearly idiosyncratic to the artist involved’ (60). In this paper, I look at two comics artists who use very

ABSTRACT In this article, we examine the phenomenon of film communities in post-authoritarian Indonesia by taking four Bandung-based grassroots film communities as our case studies. Drawing on a research work underpinned by a non-exploitative insider methodology grounded in a dialogical participatory observation supplemented with semi-structured in-depth interviews with key participants, we argue that

Abstract This autoethnographic text details the author’s reflections on his own positionality and process in researching and publishing a zine in the emerging and contested field of queer rebetology. By using the archive as a means for scholarly and creative interventions in the Greek urban music genre of rebetika, the author draws attention to the process of erasure that has occurred in discourses

ABSTRACT In this paper, I utilize autographics as an autoethnographic methodology to illustrate the subjective experience of being a precariously employed migrant academic in Australia. The autographic narrative, as well as the traditional text, are in dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s work on migration and estrangement, in order to explore migration both as a physical movement between countries, but also

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the role that guilt plays in Australia’s construction of its outsiders by focusing on contemporary migrant experience. I build upon Sarah Ahmed’s work on the politics of emotion to read migrant interviews in relation to media: films, political speeches, and other discursive structures that facilitate social organization in Australia. In the first part of this paper

ABSTRACT This study documents the stories of lesbians separatism during the 1970s-80s in Western Australia, exploring aspects of identity, community, safe space, culture, and connection. Although there is increasing literature on the subject in Australia, the phenomenon of lesbian separatism has received little attention, particularly the Western Australian context. Therefore, sharing these marginalized

ABSTRACT This article explores non-human looking avatars as models for alternative conceptions of identity. Thatgamecompany’s Flower is used here as the specific example of a more general model for Game and Cultural Studies scholars to think about the representation and reproduction of relationality and identity through avatars that are not designed to resemble human or animal-like beings. The avatar

ABSTRACT This article explores the interplay between the nation and media in times of national crisis. Through a critical textual analysis of the AC Japan’s public service announcements (PSAs), I argue that the PSAs in the early post-earthquake period reproduce nationalistic discourses of the Japanese that resembles the core tenets of nihonjinron (discourse of Japaneseness) by 1) reiterating the homogeneity

ABSTRACT This paper argues that eating biscuits produces a small-scale war re-enactment with each bite. I focus on Anzac biscuits, which are sold at cafes, baked at home, nibbled at morning tea, and are a crucial fundraiser for veterans’ organizations across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. The biscuit’s commemorative function starts with the Australia New Zealand Army Corps’ participation in the

ABSTRACT This article is concerned with creative arts practices as forms of knowing, and as forms capable of expressing this knowing. Our aim here is to make sense of the factors that have driven creative artists into the university over the last three decades, and to articulate how creative practices function in the present ‘research’ context. We argue that, after three decades of creative arts practice

Published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT In this opening contribution to the Special Issue Cultural Studies and Education: A Dialogue of Disciplines?, Guest Editors Bill Green and Andrew Hickey survey the pedagogical and disciplinary intersections of Cultural Studies and Education. Positioning an account of Cultural Studies that draws attention (back) to Cultural Studies’ founding pedagogical project, Green and Hickey note that Cultural

ABSTRACT Deepfakes draw on algorithmic powers, machine learning and modern capabilities for processing information to allow users to insert the face, body, and visual information about a real-world person into a false setting, producing highly convincing videos that appear to be a ‘true’ record. Emerging on the scene in the past half-decade, deepfake applications have become an object of widespread

ABSTRACT Cultural Studies’ ‘institutional presence’ in higher education is well documented; however, less well understood are nuances between different institutional ‘types’ and the way that Cultural Studies is variously taught and practiced in these settings. This paper will explore the authors’ experiences of teaching with Cultural Studies in Australian regional universities and the opportunities

ABSTRACT This special issue addresses notions of fakery in our contemporary media environment, from fake news to the deepfake. While all media contains elements of creative fabrication, we define ‘media fakery’ as an attempt to conceal the origins of information that must contain a degree of human intentionality to be considered ‘fake’. Fakery is no longer limited to news media or any particular mode

ABSTRACT Successive generations of First Nation scholars have critiqued the ongoing institutional and disciplinary complicity of Higher Education to support settler colonialism. These critiques extend to include Cultural Studies, despite the field’s inter (anti)disciplinary efforts to expose power and inequality in social relations, dominant institutions, popular culture, and everyday life. As part

ABSTRACT The ‘community’ of community media has long been a contentious question in the field. Given the wide range of interpretations of community and the ongoing fragmentation of media audiences, it has never been more important for community media to define and delineate their audiences. One approach to this is developing and maintaining a sense of mediatized community identity through content production

ABSTRACT Cyclists are understood as vulnerable road users, but when cyclists are killed by drivers, media reports shared to social media are often accompanied by comments that aggressively rearticulate hierarchies of automobility. This article explores the news reporting, public social media sharing, and public social media comments about the deaths of two cyclists – Mike Hall and Cameron Frewer. To

ABSTRACT With the rise in the twenty-first century of streaming services such as Netflix, binge-watching has become a significant new mode of media consumption. This article contends that binge-watching, with its extended duration, forms of absorption, attention and surveillance-commodification marks a challenge for teaching the kinds of critical understanding around representation that underpins Cultural

ABSTRACT The focus here is on English teaching and media education, with particular reference to the Australian and English contexts. It considers the role and significance of media in and for English teaching, as a school subject. It asks: What are the legacies of Cultural Studies in this regard? English teaching is considered in relation to, first, the UK national curriculum, the 1989 Cox Report

Published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (Vol. 36, No. 4, 2022)

ABSTRACT Indo Chic describes a western fashion trend that extracts elements of South Asian fashion and accessories, including the bindi, tikka and henna, and styles them alongside Western fashion items. Indo Chic became popular again in 2013, and those who wore the style faced accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’ by communities of South Asian diasporic (desi) people. This article interrogates the

ABSTRACT This article questions how cultural studies has been constructed as an educational project to examine if it might offer principles for learning about living in digital culture now. It first considers how the subject of Cultural Studies developed in relationship to education and then revisits empirical studies of cultural studies in schools. The essay engages with perspectives on evaluating

ABSTRACT This article examines the utility of drawing on Cultural Studies to aid teachers in reassessing understandings and approaches to multicultural education; how engaging with notions of cultural complexity, hybridity and essentialism offers a critical tool box around issues of cultural difference that ultimately provides a better understanding of school communities in a global context. We revisit

ABSTRACT In her widely cited and influential “cyborg manifesto”, Donna Haraway argues that “cyborg imagery” can provide a way out of the maze of dualisms we have used to explain our bodies and our tools to ourselves and concludes by asserting that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. We depart from the cyborg/goddess distinction by invoking a widely recognised archetype in Japanese popular

ABSTRACT This article argues for a revised understanding of 'complicity' as a undertheorised position and relationship within the social organisation of gender. The concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’, developed by R.W. Connell and others, has been influential for understanding masculinities as shared ideals embedded within gender power relations, but scholars have paid less attention to Connell’s attendant

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of production techniques in shaping representations of cultural diversity in South Korean reality television. We first discuss the South Korean government’s evolving guidelines concerning the representation of minorities on television and identify in the guidelines exhortations against discriminatory framing of migrants. Next, we qualitatively examine three popular

ABSTRACT The collection of papers in this special issue of Continuum draws out the many dimensions of fakery in contemporary digitally mediated cultures. The editors observe in their Introduction that ‘media fakery’ needs to be understood more broadly than simply fake news or misinformation. Rather, it sits within the broader media ecology of entertainment as well as news and occupies an ambiguous

ABSTRACT This is an investigation into the ways in which serial killer mythology and notions of place are often co-created. In this study, we focus on the mythos of the serial killer and its relationship to the construct of Australian suburbia. We focus on the ways in which the tension between working-class suburbia and upper-middle-class suburbia plays out through the serial killer narrative. Politically

ABSTRACT Hermeneutic philosophy and phenomenology are advanced in the Handbook of Media and Communication Research as being two of four ‘main traditions’ shaping media and communication studies. Informed by hermeneutic scholarship, ‘ready-to-hand’ (Heidegger) habitual media user practices become a central focus. Drawing on Gadamer’s hermeneutic thought positions agent practices within perspective or

ABSTRACT Latin America has suffered disproportionately during the COVID-19 pandemic. The human impact has been chaotically and catastrophically evident across the three countries we examine here: Colombia, Chile, and México. Those nations were already creaking under the effect of generations of neoliberal ideology: their intellectual, political, and ruling-class fractions had long-embraced its core

(2022). Pandemic citizenship: introduction. Continuum: Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 165-168.

ABSTRACT Live streaming has become an increasingly popular phenomenon in recent years and has turned private weddings and funerals into ‘public rituals’ online. This article examines how transition services reinforce collective identity and negotiate meanings via livestreaming-mediated communication. Based on ethnographic data from the French Hmong community, this article illustrates how does the diasporic

ABSTRACT Our world’s climate is changing. The ramifications of the current ecological age and the possibility of habitation in – if not strictly post-apocalyptic – very different living conditions than the present, has spurned a pressing need to address our place in a more-than–human frame. A disjuncture between the urgency for concrete action on climate change and the actions of a political class

(2021). Fashion futures and critical fashion studies. Continuum: Vol. 35, No. 6, pp. 813-823.

ABSTRACT Indonesia’s bid to be the world’s Muslim fashion capital involves a growing number of female Muslim fashion designers and business owners. With more urban Indonesian young women adopting modest clothing, increasing state support for creative and digital economy, and ease of access and distribution, the market expansion of the Muslim fashion industry allows young Muslim women to become successful

ABSTRACT This article examines the relations of creativity, enterprise, and activism that define Aranya, a luxury fashion brand based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It argues that these relations disrupt existing theorizations of the local and global in fashion scholarship, and help to undo the knowledge practices which position the global North as fashion’s centre. The brand is instructive for understandings

ABSTRACT Transitioning fashion towards sustainability will require changes in practices including the design, production, promotion, sale and consumption of clothing. Using data gathered through a qualitative method termed ‘wardrobe examinations’, this article examines fashion consumption through the lens of social practice theory in order to better understand how the practice of fashion consumption

ABSTRACT There is a common perception that people do not care for the clothes they own. We regularly hear that clothing users discard garments early and replace them frequently with inexpensive, poor quality items. Although these points are justifiable when considered in relation to the 92 million tonnes of textile waste generated annually, it is inaccurate to suggest that all clothing users care little

ABSTRACT The emergence of digital fashion activism in the second decade of the twenty-first century coincides with ‘popular feminism’. As trend forecasting site, Worth Global Style Network (WGSN) noted in 2014 ‘the idea of feminism in itself has become almost fashionable’. In this paper we explore how the appropriation of feminism as a fashionable slogan relates to the framing of fashion as a feminist

ABSTRACT As the urgency around the environmental impact of fashion production grows, biotechnologies that engineer microbes and other biological organisms such as plants offer cleaner, greener processes and entirely new products. Bacteria and yeasts may be engineered to colour fabric, generate synthetic fibre precursors, and produce enzymes used to break down and convert waste. Biotechnology can also

ABSTRACT For fashion, which is connected so intimately to our bodies, senses, emotions, and memories, value is more than a matter of cost. In order to illustrate the true value of fashion ‘radical transparency’ is framed as a tool through which brands can counter supply chain opacity and tell stories about the production of their garments. However, models of transparency often conceal more than they

ABSTRACT This industry dialogue, facilitated by Harriette Richards, co-founder of the Critical Fashion Studies research group at the University of Melbourne, is an edited version of an industry panel discussion that took place during the International Critical Fashion Studies conference at the University of Melbourne in February 2020. The panellists, Yatu Widders Hunt, Courtney Holm and Teslin Doud

(2021). Introduction: digital cultures and acts of refusal, secrecy and power across privacy-enhancing technologies. Continuum: Vol. 35, The Dark Social: Online Practices of Resistance, Motility and Power, pp. 661-666.

ABSTRACT Newly emerging technologies for digital communication facilitate rapid data collection, storage and processing whereby subsequent interactions can be unpredictable. This creates a ‘darker turn’ in neo-communicative practices. That which is 'dark' is understood as communication that has either limited distribution, is not open to all users – closed groups by way of example – or is veiled. Dark

ABSTRACT In this paper we bring together media logics, affordances and affect theory to ask how conspiracy theory moves through WhatsApp groups and moves people through their encounters with these contents towards ‘conspiracy thinking’. Firstly, we draw upon media logic theory to examine the extent to which WhatsApp’s architecture, design and technical functions ‘steer’ users’ towards particular communication

ABSTRACT Targeted advertising lies at the heart of digital economic models and has been scrutinized with respect to the potential pathologies of discriminatory job and housing advertising along with concerns about harmful forms of manipulation and the invasive character of online data harvesting. This article takes as its focus the non-transparent forms of cultural association reproduced by targeted

ABSTRACT This paper analytically responds to the collaborative performance work Writing the Feminist Internet as a motif of fourth wave feminism. It probes at the edge of Internet dark spaces that are often occupied by those who point to complacency in engagement with networking systems, by drawing auxiliary attention to the apparatus. Further examination sheds light on the valences and anarchy of

ABSTRACT As the boundaries between national and international news continue to blur, news translation has become an important site for examining how issues of language, culture, and risk influence how events are framed as they cross sociocultural and linguistic barriers. The current study contributes to the growing research in this area via showing how attention to sociolinguistic features like registers

ABSTRACT On 25 September 2020, the ABC released a documentary film to mark the twentieth anniversary of Cathy Freeman’s gold medal victory in the women’s 400 metres at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Media interest in Freeman’s victory still erupts periodically, most recently, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary. This article revisits Cathy Freeman’s historic gold-medal-winning performance in order

ABSTRACT Using ethnographic methods to investigate the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic affected two Makerspaces, we discuss the limits of the Maker movement’s ideological foundations. Both spaces moved their activities online but differ in their engagement with Corona-specific projects: While the eLab Berlin decided to avoid any involvement due to legal and practical issues, the South London Makerspace

ABSTRACT In April 2020, the Civic Imagination Project at the University of Southern California, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, asked participants around the world to share some of their reflections on what the world of 2060 might look like, and what roles the COVID-19 pandemic may have played in transforming how we live and relate to each other. For the past six years, the Civic Imagination Project

ABSTRACT This article draws on the work of Raymond Williams to argue that under covid-19 the dominant ‘ways of seeing’ the countryside and the city in Britain are working to obscure the structural violence of capitalism. Cultural narratives of ‘exodus’ from the city abound in British media, fuelling a material ‘race for space’ as the middle class rush to buy up rural properties. The ‘cottagecore’ social

(2022). One for the boys: an affirmative feminist boys studies. Continuum: Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 1-3.

ABSTRACT The emergence of deepfakes is the latest form to prompt anxieties over the wider implications of misinformation. This chapter explores possibilities for how these technologies extend the repertoire of modalities available for documentary makers. While these ‘synthetic media’ offer a disruption of the documentary genre, they are also a continuation of long-standing trends within software culture

ABSTRACT The artist as ‘star-text’ remains intrinsic to the music industry's understandings of ‘authenticity’ and subsequent commodification of the music artist (and circulations of celebrity). Partial band ‘reunions’ and touring acts with few original band members speak to the economic rewards in continuing well-known bands as brands. This article examines the cultural and intellectual property contexts

Published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies (Vol. 36, No. 4, 2022)

ABSTRACT The global reality of the COVID-19/Corona pandemic paradoxically boosted national politics, broadcasting and citizenship. Media coverage, especially initially, praised citizen solidarity and the creative solutions that were pioneered to care for each other. A year later, a lasting social learning curve throughout and after this crisis seems illusory. The pandemic, this paper argues, needs