ABSTRACT This retrospective examines Tom O’Regan’s influence on South African cultural policy studies in light of the post-apartheid political transition, corruption and fallism. Implications for policy studies are discussed with regard to a recently liberated state that first, adopted Australian cultural policy precepts, and then closed them out 23 years later in response to the Rhodes Must Fall movement

ABSTRACT Brian Shoesmith, an Australian academic, spent the last phase of his academic journey in Bangladesh. He contributed to developing a new Media Studies and Journalism department in a relatively new private university in Bangladesh. Also, he served as an academic adviser in the University of Liberal Arts (ULAB). He initiated to publish an anthology on Bangladeshi media and culture which was first

ABSTRACT This research will attempt to understand the politics of the representation of Christian women characters in Hindi films, Julie, and Bobby from a postcolonial feminist lens. This paper studies the portrayal of Christian women characters as ‘westernized’ and ‘common’ in Hindi films. To prove this argument, a postcolonial feminist approach with the theories of Partha Chatterjee’s idea of the

ABSTRACT A personal appreciation of the work and legacy of Tom O’Regan, focusing on his 1994 essay “Two or Three Things I Know About Meaning”. Although O’Regan’s work is often described as being concerned primarily with social discourses and institutional contexts in the landscape of audiovisual media, he also paid close attention to the mechanisms of film and TV texts. His view of meaning was complex

(2021). Continuum and the legacy of Brian Shoesmith and Tom O’Regan: a memorial issue. Continuum. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This short reflective piece revisits Tom O’Regan’s article “Some Reflections on the ‘Policy Moment’” from 1992. Tom’s intervention in the cultural policy debate which raged at that time was magisterial, wide ranging and inclusive. He saw the argument for policy to frame engaged scholarly activity as limiting the social relevance of the humanities and social sciences. Whereas the traditional

ABSTRACT Casting an eye back on the cultural scene in Perth in the late eighties and early nineties, this article reflects on the legacy of the late Brian Shoesmith. I discuss Brian’s work on Harold A. Innis and communications theory, his interests in Asian media and Indian cinema, the research agendas he forged at Edith Cowan University and his institution building efforts later in his career. In

ABSTRACT The paper addresses the implications for the contemporary academy of changes in the organization of journal editorship. Taking the example of cultural studies and the journal Continuum, it considers the shift from the intimate ‘artisanal’ mode in which many journals have had their origins to more impersonal alienated forms, organized through market or quasi-market relations. A common interpretation

ABSTRACT This article reflects with affection on the work of the late Professor Tom O’Regan, in his interwoven capacities as scholar, teacher, colleague, friend, catalyst, and generous mentor to younger scholars. It attempts to convey the intellectual openness, curiosity, and conversations with others that shaped his research in Media and Cultural Studies, and to make visible the skeins of connective

ABSTRACT This article focuses upon the context within which much of Tom O’Regan’s early work took place, and which this work helped to frame. The importance of a particular formation of cultural nationalism to the beginnings of media and cultural studies in Australia is no longer front of mind for most of us today as we confront the challenges of a dramatically reconfigured transnational media landscape

ABSTRACT Tom O’Regan’s vision of cultural policy in the 1990s was original and durable because he emphasized the rhetorical politics and enunciative contexts of policy statements as well as their propositional contents. Reflecting on some of the changes that have occurred in Australia since that time, my commemoration of Tom’s work explores the role of the “corridor” metaphor in his thinking.

ABSTRACT Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s series Fleabag (BBC/Amazon Prime, 2016-‘19) has been praised for its revitalization of direct address. Whereas this device is often used to foster intimacy between character and audience, I argue that Fleabag problematizes this. I examine the nature of Fleabag’s address through the lens of habits of constant connectivity in online attention economies in conjunction with

ABSTRACT In this short tribute to the work of Tom O’Regan, I focus on his earliest publications, in the decade from the mid-1980s. This was both the time I knew him best and the period when he wrote most discursively and theoretically.

ABSTRACT Netflix’s supernatural crime series Tidelands (2019) was the subscription video service’s first commissioned original series to be produced in Australia. Shot in tropical Queensland with a diverse cast of local and international stars, Tidelands exemplifies the complex challenges involved in Netflix’s attempts to be a global producer creating content for national markets. This article builds

(2021). Theory for the world to come: speculative fiction and apocalyptic anthropology. Continuum. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Despite the implementation of multicultural policies since the 1970s, anxiety over cultural and religious ‘others’ continue to challenge Australia’s diversifying national identity. Problematic media representations of racial and religious minorities persist in Australia and continue to shape public perceptions and political discourses on issues of migration and intercultural relations. This

(2021). What’s the use?: on the uses of use, by Sara Ahmed, North Carolina, Duke University Press, 2019. Continuum. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT At the centre of this article is iNakba, a digital navigational application created by a Tel Aviv-based NGO in 2014. The app superimposes a layer of ruined Palestinian localities destroyed following the 1948 war, on top of the established and hegemonic Israeli geographical representation. At the end of this war and with the formation of the State of Israel, the presence of these localities

ABSTRACT The stories we tell about the world, through worlding practices such as films, open the possibilities of certain futures, while foreclosing other imaginable ones. Attuned to recent work on political ontology that takes contests over ‘how the world is’ as a starting point for navigating the degradation and uncertainty of life in the Anthropocene, we trace how two films released in 2016, Seed:

ABSTRACT This paper examines a series of experimental art-science projects that attempt to resurrect dead or endangered forms of life. Focusing on works by Marguerite Humeau, Diemut Strebe, Pinar Yoldas and Svenja Kratz, each of which was developed in close collaboration with scientists, often in laboratory environments, the paper approaches art-science collaborations of this sort as a flourishing

ABSTRACT This article offers a reading of the recent New Zealand omnibus film Waru, written and directed by nine Māori wāhine (women). The film is significant in that it is female-centric, but also told through a specifically indigenous lens. As such, Waru clearly resists traditional ways of looking from the hegemonic spectatorial position, historically assumed to be male and white. Instead, I suggest

ABSTRACT On 2 September 2015, Alan Kurdi’s image went viral on the social media and immediately shook the world. This paper concerns not so much with the referent as with the capacity of image to represent. What in an image endows it the capacity to shame entire humanity, heterogeneous as it is? To further complicate, how does a digital image – a conglomeration of pixilated dots, devoid of any materiality

ABSTRACT Migration, be it national or transnational, is often a disruptive and traumatising experience that brings with it loneliness and homesickness. This article investigates how migrants from QwaQwa in the Eastern Free State Province in South Africa (re)imagine and (re)visualize the homeland away from home through social networking. QwaQwa is a remote mountanous area located in the Eastern Free

ABSTRACT Herding in Nigeria is associated often with invasions. This study investigates how herding and its associated invasions are metaphorically conceptualized in Nigerian newspapers as natural disasters, removal of dirt and hunting exercise. Based on instances of the use of figurative expressions in Nigerian national newspaper reports on the herdsmen-farmers dispute, the study reveals that herding

ABSTRACT Once a staple of game design, linear game spaces and play have slowly been pushed aside by open-world and sandbox mechanics in the AAA game industry. Most adventure games now have a duty to give visible agency to the player and ensure that their experience seem unique. Yet, this article argues that linearity in games should be reclaimed as a site of queer pleasure. Tackling how non-linear

ABSTRACT Contemporary risk society has caused many creative practitioners to question the role, effect, and potential of their practice. In seeking to find a means by which creative writing can do something in the real world, this article examines the use of directive speech acts – such as commands, requests, and invitations – in print and digital branching narratives and choose-your-own-adventure

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the recurring use of symbols of the ghost and of memory in women’s and feminist writing and scholarship, and argues that these demonstrate an implicit challenge to linear conceptions of time. Viewing this spectral approach to temporality in consideration with Jacques Derrida’s notion of hauntology, this paper argues for a feminist temporality that consciously draws

ABSTRACT My purpose is to consider the role that uncertainty might play in reimagining political responsibility in Australia. There is a growing body of scholarship that is re-examining what it might mean to be settler colonial and politically responsible. It urges settlers to not only comprehend their complicity in structures of violence and oppression – colonialism, environmental degradation, racial

ABSTRACT This brief showcase of the medical humanities research networks and collaborations emerging at the University of Queensland explores the role this interdisciplinary field may play in post-pandemic Australasia. Suggesting that cultural, social and historical negotiations with medicine will become increasingly important as our societies recover from the COVID-19 crisis, the showcase presents

ABSTRACT This article introduces the special issue of Continuum on ‘Precarious Futures: Cultural Studies in Pandemic Times’. The issue arises out of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference ‘Cultural Transformation’ held in December 2019, in Meanjin (Brisbane), on the land of the Jagera and Turrbal peoples. The articles in this special issue originate from this conference, and have

ABSTRACT This essay argues that the School Strike for Climate movement, and with it the whole climate movement as well as other resistance mobilizations, is in danger of being immobilized by the logic of the spectacle, the coronavirus pandemic, and government lockdowns. It ranges over issues of political performance, media spectacle, climate inaction and the challenges of protest in the contemporary

ABSTRACT Militarized perception is always leaking into public culture, from the aerial prospect of balloon flight to the soldier’s helmet camera. Increasingly, the mode of militarized perception most powerfully emergent in Anglo-American everyday life is that of the militarized drone: flattened, loitering, zooming, networked. This mode of perception is enacted by a logistic assemblage that is military

ABSTRACT Hélène Cixous delicately reminds us that doors perform a material and affective liminality between what is and what might be, and questions the reason and rhyme of doors as ways in and out of spaces which denote passage and movement; and as structures which separate, connect, and demarcate entanglements of being, becoming and belonging on the inside or out. In this paper, we take up Cixous’

(2020). Introduction: confucian values and television in East Asia. Continuum: Vol. 34, Confucian values and television in East Asia, pp. 647-650.

ABSTRACT This paper considers how subtextual suggestions of childhood abuse overshadow the centrally presented narratives of sex addiction in Steve McQueen’s Shame and adolescent daughter-father incest in Tom Roth’s The War Zone. Drawing on these films as companion pieces, we discuss how the unseen, unspoken, and physical conveyance of emotion – understood as affect triggered by life experience – is

ABSTRACT On the social media platform Snapchat users share images and videos that disappear after a set amount of time. Snapchat has developed an augmented reality brand culture that embeds brands within this live sharing of images and video on the platform. This advertising model is culturally significant because rather than ship finished ads, Snapchat optimizes the distribution of ad-making tasks

ABSTRACT This article examines how two works of fiction depict male same-sex desire in Australian military history. The protagonists in the novel Bodies of Men and the short story collection The Boys of Bullaroo do not identify as gay or bisexual, yet they develop intensely intimate friendships that become sexual. The texts come from different literary and popular genres, but they both represent what

ABSTRACT Little has been written about the possibility of artistic immersive experiences to push us out of our habits of perception and into a mode of critical reflection. The article starts with the space of the body and its phenomenological engagement within immersion. Merleau-Ponty’s notion ofpre-reflection is introduced. This serves as the starting point for accessing and evaluating artistic experiences

ABSTRACT The Little Nyonya is a Singapore produced Chinese-language historical television drama centring on the struggles of its heroine Yueniang in negotiating turbulent relationships among three Chinese Peranakan merchant families in Singapore and Melaka. Her life choices are made within the framework of Confucian moral binaries of filial piety and a traditional paternalism that distinguishes righteous

ABSTRACT This paper takes the cultural text of Association football (soccer) and some media texts created in response to it, to explore the passions linked to the game. In particular, we examine several poems and ‘recitativo’ (spoken moments in musical performances) to trace some links between the notions of love, suffering and madness that are referred to so often in conversations regarding the cultural

1Netflix show, Grace and Frankie, is significant in its representation of ageing. While it may appear ground-breaking to see people in their seventies and eighties navigating (re)invention of self ...

ABSTRACT Contemporary populist political rhetoric often makes use of a concept of a ‘forgotten people’ or a ‘silent majority’, who are constructed as a subset of population and often utilized as an electoral base by populist leaders, particularly in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The concept emerged in the Twentieth Century and has undergone substantial re-configuration

ABSTRACT Yael Hersonski’s Holocaust documentary A Film Unfinished has been read as an exercise in empathic unsettlement that destabilizes the propagandistic intentions of a Nazi gaze that produced footage of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, this paper argues that Hersonski also shows that a practical gaze that incorporates the gazes of those both inside and outside of the footage can more effectively reveal

ABSTRACT Appearances on entertainment television constitute opportunities for politicians, not only to convey political messages, but also to perform personality. Most research has focused on the interview setting as the locus of such performances. But in addition to being interviewed, politicians occasionally turn entertainers themselves, dancing, singing, playing instruments or doing comedy. This

ABSTRACT This article examines how Korean reality television has endorsed bimaxillary surgery through the deployment of the celebrity body in the early 2010 s. Although the production of a plastic surgery-related reality programme is not a local phenomenon, the media discourse of bimaxillary surgery has disclosed the impetus of locality in the social construction of external beauty and self-transformation

ABSTRACT In an era in which comedians have been positioned as public commentators, a cycle of Australian television documentaries centres on the premise of a comedian’s investigation of a theme of existential significance. Produced for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, these series are Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure (2009), Judith Lucy’s Spiritual Journey (2011), Judith Lucy is All

ABSTRACT This article draws on Wallerstein’s notion of world-systems to contribute to the theorization of cultural hybrids. Through an analysis of hip hop and yoga, as well as their arrangement as a hip hop yoga class in Perth, Western Australia, this article offers a framework through which to explore the social (re)productions, expressions and consumptions, both within and across differing local

ABSTRACT This article documents governmental response to ‘sexually violent’ material in Australia between 1983 to 1995 through the lens of media classification. Three major changes will be discussed that span the introduction of two new classification categories: the X category for sexually explicit materials (SEMs) in 1983, the MA15+ category for Mature Adults over 15 in 1993, and the establishment

ABSTRACT This paper examines the construction of contemporary parental identities related to live music concerts and popular music fandom in the media. The analysis on transforming parental identities presented in this paper draws on Bennett’s (2012; 2013) work on ageing music fans and their sustained practices, Grossberg’s (1992) notion of ‘youth’ as a site of struggle between young people and adults

ABSTRACT The article discusses interactions between emotions, memory and user-generated digital content in the context of online protest campaigns. Using as a case study anti-government protest in Ukraine (2013–2014) and Venezuela (2019), it compares how pro- and anti-government communities use visuality and memoricity of internet memes to stir affect and promote their political agendas. It shows that

In the communicative spaces of digital media with their expanded base of user participation, emotions or the social circulation of feelings play a crucial role in the manner in which political positions are articulated and everyday negotiations with politics are performed. The articles in this Special Issue stem from an international workshop held in July 2017 at the University of Amsterdam titled

ABSTRACT From the early 2000s onward the Netherlands has witnessed unexpected and unprecedented polarization. Right-wing populist activism challenged the right of newcomers to belong in Dutch society. Coinciding with this populist swing, participatory media (web communities such as Marokko.nl, blog sites such as GeenStijl – which translates as ‘BadForm’ – and later Facebook and Twitter) have become

ABSTRACT In this paper we interrogate how different research assemblages act as affect-enhancing devices for elections by drawing from the 2015 Canadian Federal election. The paper uses scholarship from media events traditions to devise an ontological framework for analysing the mediatization of elections and to show how research assemblages propagate a myth of the mediated centre. We then discuss

ABSTRACT Mobile telephony and the Internet have ensured that digitized communication is a routine in which everyone engages. Since music artistes use their songs as archival tools in documenting social events and changes, we consider, in this study, the (re)presentation of Computer Mediated Communication in Nigerian Hip-hop. To this end, six purposively selected songs by six Nigerian hip-hoppers are

ABSTRACT This paper offers a critical queer analysis of Star Trek as a history of the future. Juxtaposing two episodes of queerness from Star Trek’s canon with the show’s depiction of gay characters in its latest drama series, the paper unpacks the multiple levels of queerness that are at once facilitated and restricted by the show’s visions of the future. Drawing on discussions of queer futurity,

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to address a transversal topic within perpetrator studies: how subsequent generations deal with the legacy of their perpetrator ancestors. To achieve it, we analyse six recent documentary films, all produced between 2015 and 2018 that cover four different contexts: Nazi Germany, the Spanish Civil War, and the Chilean and Argentine dictatorships. Through a comparative

ABSTRACT Using Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary films about mass killings in Indonesia – The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) – as an entry point, this article explores how perpetrators remember the past and how it is interpreted by them in the present in relation to this particular socio-historical context using a Bourdieusian approach. As represented in both films, perpetrators

ABSTRACT In recent years the number of diverse forms of cultural productions focused on the perpetrators has increased significantly eliciting thus a turn toward this problematic figure. The originality of these narratives lies in the shift in point of view they propose: their protagonists, rather than being the victims of the atrocities, are instead their perpetrators. A significant number of documentary

ABSTRACT In recent years, both academia and popular culture have shown what some scholars have pointed out as the turn to the perpetrator. Although the voice of the perpetrator has never been completely silent since the National Reorganization Process (the military junta’s name for state terror and economic reorganization ended in 1983), recently two documentary films, 70 y Pico (‘70 and Pico’, Mariano

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the representations of perpetrators of human rights violations in post-dictatorial Chilean cinema, specifically in documentary film. My objective is to examine how cultural memory has been produced through several cinematic productions. To this end, I focus on the representation of perpetrators in a corpus of four contemporary documentary films: El Mocito (‘The young