Tag Archives: research

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Twitter_logo_blueThe School of English & Media Studies has joined Twitter! If you’re an EMS student, graduate or simply interested in creative writing, theatre, English literature, media studies, communication, academic writing and the diverse research associated therewith, and you tweet, please get in touch with us at @SEMSMassey and tell us what you’re up to – we’d love to connect with you.

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Lahar awareness research will help save lives – Massey University

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Many skiers and snowboarders on Mt Ruapehu do not know how to get to safety if a potentially deadly lahar came rampaging down the mountainside, research from Massey graduate Leleiga Taito shows.

Source: Lahar awareness research will help save lives – Massey University

Many skiers and snowboarders on Mt Ruapehu do not know how to get to safety if a potentially deadly lahar came rampaging down the mountainside, research from Massey graduate Leleiga Taito shows.

It is believed to be the first international research that has documented a disconnect between safety information about lahars (the volcanic flow of ash, snow and rocks) and the key 18-30 year-old age group of young adventure sport enthusiasts.

“Many people didn’t know what a lahar is, or that they may have less than two minutes from the warning siren to escape,” Ms Taito says.

The Upper Hutt woman, who is the first in her family to graduate from university, will be conferred with a Bachelor of Communication honours degree (First Class) at the Michael Fowler Centre on Thursday.

Her research, investigating barriers at Whakapapa ski field that may be stopping young people from following safety instructions, was partly made possible by the awarding of a GNS Science scholarship arranged in partnership with Massey’s School of English and Media Studies and the Joint Centre for Disaster Research. It is hoped Massey students will help to develop further resources based on Ms Taito’s research to address the issue in the future.

There are plans also for Ms Taito’s findings to be used by GNS Science, the Department of Conservation and Ruapehu Alpine Lifts to communicate better with young skiers and snowboarders.

Twice-yearly tests of the Eruption Detection System over the past five years showed up to 50 people per test failed to get out of the valleys.  Those people were asked to fill in a survey, which showed some didn’t know they were in danger zones, or thought they had traversed high enough out of the valleys to be out of danger.

Ms Taito had only ever been on the snow once, joking: “Samoans don’t do snow”. She spent three months working for the ski lift operator while living at Whakapapa village at Mt Ruapehu last winter. Describing herself as a “Samoan population of one”, she conducted in-depth research observing the behaviour of 257 mountain users and interviewing 29 of them about their awareness of lahar risk.

She found the sub-culture of young experienced snowboarders and skiers have their own lingo and use euphemisms that normalise crashing and unsafe behaviour on the mountain. They deal with serious situations such as accidents, hazards and emergencies using humour and friendly teasing.

“Skiing is such a hazardous sport and they become desensitized to the danger factor. They are there to have fun and don’t want to think about anything happening- they call it a buzz kill. Anti-authoritarian framing is the norm for a subculture such as adventure sports enthusiasts,” she says.

The research participants offered a range of safety suggestions, including better locational identification on trail maps and creating a cellphone app that provides safety information.

Ms Taito attended a pre-season briefing with emergency service staff from the mountain to share her insights.  Her recommendations include better signage and using digital technology to inform and remind people they are on an active volcano and what to do when the lahar warning siren sounds.

“Young skiers and snowboarders’ love of speed could also be turned into a positive communication feature,” she says.

Safety communications could tap into their own group values by featuring a great skier speeding down the mountain contrasted with the speed of a lahar to show that nobody can outrun a lahar.”

After five years of study at Massey, Ms Taito is looking forward to visiting family in Australia, going back to the mountain to see her new snow buddies and looking for her first permanent communications’ job.  But first of all there is going to be a big party this week when her large family celebrates her graduation. And she hopes to get her family up to the snow this ski season.

Summer Scholarship win for Leleiga’s Safety Communication Project

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Congratulations to Bachelor of Communication Honours student Leleiga Taito who has won a second award for her potentially life-saving Mt Ruapehu safety communication research.  In January, Leleiga received an award from GNS Science to conduct research into safety communication on Mt Ruapehu.  Now, Leleiga has received a Summer Scholarship to work with Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley over Summer in order to produce creative digital research outputs from her Mt Ruapehu ethnographic video data.

Leleiga has just spent three months living in Whakapapa Village on Mt Ruapehu gathering written and audiovisual ethnographic field data about safety culture – you can see her fantastic blog about her experiences here: http://www.esocsci.org.nz/social-science-snow-and-safety-communications-why-do-people-ignore-safety-warnings-guest-blogger-leleiga-taito/

Over Summer Leleiga will be busy in post-production, editing and finalising film footage so as to make her research findings easy to share with others, and spread the word in creative ways about mountain safety communication. The 2-minute sample of raw video footage posted with this blog shows a real-time view of just one ski slope during a lahar warning test – the video shows that many people don’t move out of the way and, had the test been real, could have been in the path of a boiling river of mud, water and rocks with the viscosity of wet concrete, moving at up to 65 kilometers per hour down the valleys of the mountain and destroying everything in its path.

Leleiga’s field work aims to crack the puzzle of why people don’t move quickly when the warning sounds, or why some move into the valley floor instead of to higher ground, so that the effectiveness of mountain safety communication can be improved.  Her research is part of a broader collaboration between the School of English & Media Studies and Massey’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research on disaster safety communication, and was funded by a scholarship from GNS Science.  Her Summer Scholarship is funded by Massey’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences.  Leleiga’s research is innovative and transdisciplinary, looking at safety research from new angles to add to our existing understanding.  She is supervised by the cross-disciplinary team of Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley (School of English & Media Studies) and Dr Mimi Hodis (School of Communication, Journalism & Marketing).

See more about the project at:

Skitrip yields important safety information

Leleiga’s first scholarship win

Ruapehu on the radio

Holidays, what holidays?

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abaconda_beach_shells-1

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Didn’t spot your lecturers on the beach this Summer?  Yes some of us were there hiding under our floppy hats and reading novel after novel … but others were still keeping the EMS ship afloat!  As well as teaching Summer School, many EMS staff have been busy on the research front over the break. Here’s a few examples of what we’ve been up to!

• Dr Jenny Lawn presented a conference paper at the Space, Race, Bodies: Geocorpographies of the City, Nation and Empire conference held at the University of Otago between the 8 and 10 December. Titled “Antigone as Male Hysteria: Pakeha Settler Masculinity and the Spectacular Corpse in Carl Nixon’s Settler’s Creek,” her paper explored Settler’s Creek alongside Sophocles’ Antigone as the springboard for an inquiry into the politics of Pakeha cultural nationalism and, speculatively, a consideration of the relationship between kinship bonds and state legitimacy.
• Also at the Space, Race and Bodies conference, Dr Kevin Glynn co-presented with Dr Julie Cupples of University of Edinburgh a conference paper on Postcolonial Spaces of Discursive Struggle in the Convergent Media Environment, focusing on case studies about Maori Television and Air New Zealand.
• Dr Sy Taffel presented a sole authored paper entitled Invisible Bodies and Forgotten Spaces: Materiality, Toxicity and Labour in Digital Ecologies to the Space, Race, Bodies conference. His paper explored social and ecological costs attributable to digital technologies which are borne by bodies and occur in spaces largely excluded from public discussions, from the Congolese children responsible for mining coltan, to the Chinese migrant workers who assemble brand-name products in informational sweatshops, and Ghanaian electronics waste workers who earn US$1 a day treating highly toxic e-waste.
• Dr Simon Sigley gave a conference presentation at Visible Evidence 21, the annual scholarly conference on documentary film, media, culture and politics, held in New Delhi, India from December 11 to 14 2014, and co-hosted by Jawaharlal Nehru University and Jamia Millia Islamia. Titled Adaptations and Relocations, his paper discussed the National Film Unit, Mythic Visions and Historical Conditions in New Zealand.
• A/Pro Angie Farrow launched her book ‘Together All Alone’: 6 shorts plays – at the PNCC Library on 8 December followed by production of plays at the Globe Theatre PN on 10, 11 and 12 December.
• A/Pro Elspeth Tilley co-published with Adult Literacy and Communication research team members Frank Sligo (first author), Margie Comrie and Niki Murray a journal article on young adult literacy learners and their experiences of the text–orality nexus in Text&Talk 2015; 35(1): 101–121.  Based on interviews with young adults in literacy training, the article argues that print literacy training cannot and does not happen in a vacuum from young people’s deeply oral world, and that an understanding of literacy, whether for teaching or research, necessarily must encompass an understanding of the oral-experiential context in which it occurs.
• Dr Kevin Glynn travelled to the USA, Costa Rica and Nicaragua to carry out field work associated with his Marsden-funded project between 13 December 2014 and 30 January 2015.
• Dr Rand Hazou travelled to Sydney to participate in ‘Connecting from a Distance’ which is a theatrical collaboration between Australia and Palestine to facilitate the transfer of skills and knowledge between theatre-makers and performers from both countries.
• Dr Ian Goodwin attended the Dangerous Consumptions Colloquium in Brisbane 11 and 12 December where he presented a work-in-progress piece derived from Marsden research project entitled ‘Precarious Popularity: Exploring Young people’s accounts of Facebook drinking photos’.
• Dr Erin Mercer presented a paper on R H Morriesons’s novel The Scarecrow at the 2015 Gothic Association of NZ and Australia (GANZA) conference in Sydney 21-22 January 2015
• Dr Sy Taffel had a sole-authored journal article entitled Perspectives on the Postdigital: Beyond Rhetorics of Progress and Novelty published in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into new Media Technologies, a peer-reviewed journal published by Sage.
• The Nielsen Bookscan 2014 Overall Bestseller’s Chart ranked Dr Thom Conroy’s novel The Naturalist as number six for the 2014 year.
• Tutor Dr Rhana Carusi was invited to speak on TV3 and write a follow-up op-ed piece as an expert on gender in regards to the effects of gendered and non-gendered toys on children, in response to the AU & NZ Green Party’s No Gender December campaign.
• The Aotearoa Creative Writing Research Network (ACWRN), directed by Thom Conroy, launched its website, featuring an introductory video, a Twitter feed on national Creative Writing news and events, a member’s directory, and online resources. Check it out at http://acwrn.ac.nz/
• A/Pro Lisa Emerson was invited to give a keynote address and workshop at the 7th Conference for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education http://www.cdtl.nus.edu.sg/tlhe/
• A/Pro Angie Farrow was invited by the organisers of the Short and Sweet Festival in Sydney to contribute to a workshop on ‘Writing the Short Play’ as well as to attend a production of her play between 26 – 31 January.

 

Congratulations Leleiga for scholarship win!

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Leleiga

Leleiga Taito reads her work at a recent Creative Writing Student Writers Read event at Massey Wellington campus.

Congratulations to Expressive Arts student Leleiga Taito who has just been announced as the winner of a $5000 scholarship to research safety communication on Mt Ruapehu in 2015.

Leleiga is currently finishing her final year of the Bachelor of Communication (Public Relations and Expressive Arts), and will start postgraduate studies (BC Honours) in 2015. Her Honours research project (supervised by the School of English & Media Studies and co-funded by GNS and Massey University through the Joint Centre for Disaster Research) will be a real-world life-saving project that looks at how to improve safety awareness for mountain users, particularly about the risks of lahars and avalanches.

Leleiga will have the opportunity not only to investigate practical safety communication challenges in depth, but also to develop creative multi-media solutions to the communication challenge. She has past experience of similar projects during her Bachelor of Communication (BC) studies, and will now extend these skills in-depth with her Honours research.

Leleiga’s prior study achievements include creative writing, digital media production, media releases, strategic communication plans, and service learning for community organisations.  For example, she created an awareness campaign for the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation in her second year of the BC. She says “Through my research I discovered that breast cancer education and prevention messages were not reaching Samoan women. I conducted a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methods to establish why women in this culture were not receiving these messages. After compiling the information that was gathered I then made suggestions on what appropriate communication strategies could be put in place. I also implemented tactics, where I created four pieces of collateral to encourage Samoan women to have mammograms. One of the communication materials was a web video with Winnie Laban sharing her experiences with breast cancer.”  You can see Leleiga’s excellent breast cancer awareness video assignment, with compelling personal interview testimony from Winnie Laban, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzoX3Nd97so&feature=youtu.be

During her Honours year Leleiga will, under the supervision of her research report supervisor (Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley from the School of English and Media Studies) prepare a comprehensive qualitative investigation of mountain user culture and the communication norms and needs that exist around safety issues. She will have the opportunity to research in the field, living at Mt Ruapehu to gather data during the ski season. Part of her reporting for the research project may also take the form of a creative output (such as a short documentary film) that could in itself provide a useful way to respond to the research challenge by building awareness of relevant safety issues and responses.

Associate Professor Tilley said Leleiga’s success was indicative of the value of the public relations/expressive arts combination in a communication degree. “Most real-world research problems or workplace communication challenges are multi-faceted, and need both a scientific and a creative response to generate understanding and solutions. I think we are really seeing, with the success of our Bachelor of Communication students who all have both a business and a humanities preparation, just how valuable this is for the next steps after a three-year degree, whether that step is further study or the workplace.”

Associate Professor Tilley said study of Expressive Arts (which can include diverse combinations of different digital media production, creative writing and theatre papers) was proving particularly useful for students. “We live in a multi-modal world. Seldom is any public communication these days just a written brochure or poster. Inevitably there are multi-media and social media dimensions. And the work that students do in learning scripting, dialogue, filming, directing, lighting, editing and a whole range of production, post-production and performance-related skills in Expressive Arts sets them up really well for this kind of work after graduation.”

Leleiga’s scholarship includes $5000 for fees and stipend, plus additional coverage of direct costs of her research including accommodation and other research expenses covered at Mt Ruapehu. Other BC students have also been involved in the wider research project – click here for a previous story about the project and click here for a link to a Radio New Zealand story about the project.

Mega-month of activity for August research roundup

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terrors of uncertainty

Associate Professor Joe Grixti’s book Terrors of Uncertainty has been re-released, along with other classic humanities texts, as part of the Routledge Revivals series

From Gothic and horror fiction to e-waste and the grand successes of The Naturalist, it’s been another very busy month for EMS research and scholarship – check out our news in this latest Research Roundup!

• Dr Erin Mercer co-edited a special issue of M/C – A Journal of Media and Culture on the Gothic, and published an article on the difficulties faced by contemporary New Zealand writers attempting to use the Gothic genre without reactivating colonialist tropes of haunting Maori, skeletal remains and a Gothicised New Zealand landscape. In the issue’s editorial, titled ‘Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture’ Dr Mercer and co-editor Dr Lorna Piatti-Farnell of AUT discussed the continuing importance of the Gothic mode in contemporary culture and how that mode is constantly evolving into new forms and manifestations. They argued that the “multi-faceted nature of the Gothic in our contemporary popular culture moment is accurately signaled by the various media on which these special issue essays focus, from television to literature, animation, music, and film. The place occupied by the Gothic beyond representational forms, and into the realms of cultural practice, is also signaled, an important shift within the bounds of Gothic Studies which is bound to initiate fascinating debates. The transformations of the Gothic in media and culture are, therefore, also surveyed, so to continue the ongoing critical conversation on not only the place of the Gothic in contemporary narratives, but also its duplicitous, malleable, and often slippery nature”. Check out the special issue at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/showToc/current along with Dr Mercer’s article on Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction – tantalisingly titled “A deluge of shrieking unreason” at http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/846

• Dr Radha O’Meara and Dr Alex Bevan were co-organisers of a symposium entitled Loops and Splices: Changing Media Technologies, on August 1st 2014. The symposium explored a recent turn in media scholarship that uncovers the overlooked and under-examined media technologies that contribute to historical and contemporary practice. Papers looked at how different media technologies have functioned in relation to historical and social practices, aesthetic traditions and specific cultural moments. Keynote speaker Prof Ian Christie (Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck College, University of London) presented on ‘Denying depth: uncovering the hidden history of 3D in photography and film.’ English and Media Studies staff were also well represented as presenters at the symposium (more below). You can see EMS staff member Dr Sy Taffel’s blog about the symposium at http://mediaecologies.wordpress.com/

• Dr Sy Taffel presented a paper entitled “ArchEcologies of Ewaste” at the Loops + Splices Symposium. The paper explored how media archaeology and media ecologies can be complementary methods in examining a range of issues pertaining to materiality and the damaging effects of the toxic digital detritus that we discard. He focused particularly on ewaste in New Zealand, where there currently is no mandatory (or even free) nationwide ewaste collection scheme, unlike in the EU where the WEEE directive mandates that all ewaste is recycled in high tech local facilities. More than 80,000 tonnes of ewaste annually enter New Zealand’s landfills, adding noxious elements like mercury, arsenic and lead to the soil and water table. Dr Taffel argued that ideas from media archaeology (a way of exploring past technology with a view to creatively reassembling and reusing technology rather than seeing earlier products as obsolete) combined with media ecologies (a reincorporative model of cyclical technological redesign) could point us towards a new age of ‘repair’ ethos, where waste was reduced and new designs resulted from the creative clash of old and new. You can see Dr Taffel’s presentation at http://prezi.com/iap-xqlsvb2o/archecologies-of-e-waste/

• Dr Kevin Glynn presented on “Technologies of Indigeneity: Māori Television and Convergence Culture,” a research focus that has emerged out of his Marsden-funded project working with Dr Julie Cupples (University of Edinburgh) on ‘Geographies of Media Convergence: Spaces of Democracy, Connectivity and the Reconfiguration of Cultural Citizenship.’ Dr Sy Taffel reports on his blog that “the paper focused on New Zealand media representations of the Urewera raids of 2007, and a more recent case where Air New Zealand, who prominently feature Maori iconography in their branding, terminated an interview with a woman for having a ta moko (traditional body markings), which they claimed would unsettle their customers. The paper explored impacts associated with the introduction of Maori TV and social networking software such as Facebook and Twitter on the ability of Maori to represent themselves and partake in mediated debates surrounding cultural identity”.

• Dr Allen Meek presented at Loops and Splices on “Testimony and the chronophotographic gesture.” The paper addressed the role of gesture in Holocaust testimony. Specifically it looked at some sequences from Claude Lanzmann’s long documentary film Shoah. Dr Meek argued that most scholarship has tended to discuss this film in terms of the transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust from the survivor to the viewer. Instead, he drew on the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s essay on gesture to develop a different reading of Shoah. Agamben argues that photography and the moving image have taken the autonomy of human gesture away from the individual person. When human gestures and movements are recorded they become a form of visual information that can be used for purposes of political control and economic exploitation. Dr Meek’s paper showed how Holocaust testimony forms part of a larger history of recorded gesture in the cinema that we need to consider if we are to understand its relation both to the Nazi system of power and to our recording and viewing of testimony today.

• In other recent research highlights, Associate Professor Joe Grixti’s book Terrors of Uncertainty: The Cultural Contexts of Horror Fiction has been re-released as part of Routledge’s ‘Revivals’ series of classic and important books. Routledge Revivals is a programme designed to reissue a wealth of out-of-print and unavailable titles written by some of the leading academic scholars of the last 120 years. To date, the programme includes titles by the likes of Sir Andrew Motion, Hermione Lee, Zygmunt Bauman, Karl Jaspers, Malcolm Bradbury, Simone Weil, Emile Durkheim, Charles Kindleberger and W. Arthur Lewis, now along with our own Head of School of English & Media Studies, Dr Grixti. Terrors of Uncertainty covers horror fiction from Frankenstein and Dracula to Psycho and The Chainsaw Massacre, illustrating how horror fiction has provided our culture with some of its most enduring themes and narratives. In selecting the text for reissue Routledge notes that: “Considering horror fiction both as a genre and as a social phenomenon, Joseph Grixti provides a theoretical and historical framework for reconsidering horror and the cultural apparatus that surrounds it. First published in 1989, this book looks at shifts in the genre’s meaning – its fascination with excess, its commentaries on the categories and boundaries of culture – and at interpretations of horror from psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, cultural and media studies”. Terrors of Uncertainty brings together a provocative range of perspectives from across the disciplines, which combine to raise important questions about the relationship between fiction and society, and the way in which we use fiction to resolve or evade our fears of uncertainty. Available in both hardcopy and e-book at: http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9781138794511/

• Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page was recently published by Random House featuring work by a number of staff and PhD students from the School of English and Media Studies: Dr Ingrid Horrocks, Dr Jack Ross, Tim Upperton, Sarah-Jane Barnett, and Aleksandra Lane. Ingrid Horrocks and Aleksandra Lane were named by reviewer Philip Matthews in the Dominion Post as two of half a dozen of “the best of a new and younger generation” of poets to whom readers should “Pay attention now and in the future” (Your Weekend, Dominion Post, 5 July 2014, p. 27).  For more information, go to the publisher’s site at http://www.randomhouse.co.nz/books/siobhan-harvey-harry-ricketts-and-james-norcliffe/essential-new-zealand-poems-9781775534594.aspx

• A launch event for Essential New Zealand Poems – Facing the Empty Page held at PNCC Library on 7 August featured local poets Johanna Aitchison (former Visiting Artist and Tutor) and Tim Upperton (Tutor and current PhD stuent) in conversation with Harry Ricketts, poet, academic editor, reviewer and cricket writer. Johanna, Tim and Harry discussed and read from the recently published ‘Essential New Zealand Poems’ edited by Siobhan Harvey, Harry Ricketts and James Norcliffe (another former Massey University School of English & Media Studies Visiting Artist).

• A creative essay by Dr Ingrid Horrocks which forms a key part of Maddie Leach’s collaborative conceptual art project if you find the good oil let us know, features until September as part of the Walters Prize exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery. See our previous post on this fascinating artwork and Dr Horrocks’ involvement here.

• Associate Professor Lisa Emerson along with Massey colleagues from Education and Communication ran multiple workshops in the lower North island for tertiary teachers on Literacy in the Transition to Tertiary Education. These presentations are based on their research, funded by the government’s Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) fund, on transitioning into tertiary study through academic literacy development, and were supported by Ako Aotearoa.

• Dr Thom Conroy launched his book, The Naturalist, on Friday 15 August – the book then spent several weeks at Number One in the NZ Bestseller list. See previous post here. See also: Thom’s interview with Kim Hill, available at: http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/20145074/thom-conroy-channeling-dieffenbach

• Senior Tutors Joy Green and Tim Upperton launched their books as part of the Kete Series – Manawatu Poetry at the PNCC Library on Poetry Day – Friday 22 August 2014. This series, published by HauNui Press features Joy’s and Tim’s poetry collections as well as that of Leonel Alvarado, School of Humanities. See more here.

• Dr Thom Conroy spoke on the Intersection between History and Fiction in Historical Fiction at Te Papa, 28 August.

• On August 25, two final-year undergraduate Bachelor of Communication students from CoHSS participated, with Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley, in an applied communication research project involving collaboration with Massey’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research, the Department of Conservation and Geological and Natural Sciences. The project, which involves gathering data on Mt Ruapehu to help understand and improve lahar warning and mountain safety communication effectiveness, was reported on Radio New Zealand’s Our Changing World Science and Environment program, see more here.

• Associate Professor Angie Farrow won won ‘Best Drama Script’ for her new play ‘Leo Rising’ at the Auckland Short and Sweet Festival 2014.

Ruapehu on the radio this week

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ruapehu viewKeep an ear tuned to Radio New Zealand this week to hear a story about the Ruapehu lahar risk communication test that English & Media Studies staff and students assisted with last week (see previous story at http://sites.massey.ac.nz/expressivearts/2014/08/26/ski-trip-yields-important-safety-communication-data/)

A shorter version of Alison Ballance’s story about the research project will play during ‘Afternoons’ at 3.30pm on Tuesday and a longer version will air during science and environment program ‘Our Changing World’ on Thursday 11 September after the 9pm news.

Podcasts will be available after the broadcasts – click this link to go to the RNZ story and links http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ourchangingworld/20140911

Book strikes right anti-colonial note

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white vanishing coverA book by an English & Media Studies staff member has been described as “a powerful statement of anti-colonialism” by an international reviewer.
In a review just published in Ariel: A review of international English literature, Associate Professor Elspeth Tilley’s 2012 book White Vanishing is called “a valuable document within the arena of Australian cultural historiography”.
White Vanishing is a longitudinal critical survey of a prevalent trope within Australian culture, the ‘lost in the bush’ myth. The book argues for reading this mythology (popularised in movies such as Picnic at Hanging Rock) differently to literal or nationalistic interpretations, by focusing on its often overlooked racial, gendered and colonialist ideology.
The reviewer, Australian fiction writer Giulia Giuffrè, notes White Vanishing is “well researched and thorough in its survey of the literature in and about the topic,” containing “a great deal of useful material and thought-provoking arguments” as well as insights that are “perceptive and shaming”. It is also, Giuffrè notes, something of a “juggernaut”.
Dr Tilley, surprisingly, agrees with the latter criticism. “Absolutely, it’s a warship of a book – and in a way it had to be. It’s putting an argument that although not controversial within particular academic circles is not likely to be at all popular with many Australians. It’s suggesting that the common characterisation of Australian culture as favouring ‘fairness’ might be better understood in terms of fairness of skin than fairness in treating others. If you’re going to make a critique like that you need your evidence thoroughly marshalled. So my aim with the book was to put the supportability of the argument beyond doubt – and then elsewhere in other ways I can have the liberty of perhaps expressing it in more subtle terms.”
Dr Tilley also agreed that the book was inherently anti-colonial. “Absolutely the book has a political stance – everything is political, including academic research and, as I point out in the book, creative writing, film, theatre and media. My argument is that any kind of creative or discursive output is enhanced if it recognises its political stance consciously, rather than pretending neutrality.”
Dr Tilley said that, since the book’s publication, she had noticed some shifts in public understanding of the ‘lost in the bush myth’ in Australia. “There have now been some fantastic artistic and creative deconstructions of the myth, particularly in the theatre. Sisters Grimm’s The Sovereign Wife used parody to skewer the ‘lost in the bush myth’ in ways that were much more entertaining than my book – but culturally speaking, we need both forms of engagement with our mythology, the detailed deconstruction and the lampooning, and each contributes to the possibility and the interpretation of the other.”
White Vanishing is published by Rodopi and available at: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=CC+152

Post-script! Another review of White Vanishing (in the journal Critical Race and Whiteness Studies) has just been published and is available at: http://www.acrawsa.org.au/files/ejournalfiles/212Iyer20141.pdf  Reviewer Sumedha Iyer of The University of New South Wales says White Vanishing is “engaging and rigorous in its analysis, and does a great deal to fill the epistemological gap in disappearance mythology in Australian literature. Even for readers who are not au fait with literary textual analysis or whiteness theory, Tilley’s book makes it easy to trace the insidious and enduring inheritance of the white vanishing trope in terms of its origins in the oppressive function of colonialism.”

Research round-up – from ‘Harry’ to the Holocaust, EMS research is diverse and defining

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harry

Oscar Kightley as Harry Anglesea in the 2013 TV3 crime drama ‘Harry’.

Six English & Media Studies researchers took advantage of the Winter teaching break to present their research at key international conferences from Oslo to Australia last month, on topics ranging from Facebook to forgiveness.

Dr Brian McDonnell presented a paper to the New Zealand Studies Association’s “Across the Pacific” conference in Oslo. The theme of the conference was New Zealand and the Pacific, and Dr McDonnell presented on “Harry: New Zealand’s First Polynesian-centred Television Crime Drama”. His talk analysed the TV show Harry, directed by Chris Dudman and broadcast as 6 1-hour episodes by TV3 in 2013. It featured Oscar Kightley as the eponymous Harry Anglesea, a tough detective with the Major Crimes Unit in South Auckland, as well as Sam Neill as Major Crimes Unit boss Jim ‘Stocks’ Stockton.  Dr McDonnell spoke about the genre links between this show and well-known overseas examples, such as Cracker, Prime Suspect, Luther, Forbrydelsen (Danish: The Killing), The Wire, Wallander and Underbelly. He explored the genesis of Harry, especially the role of its creator and producer Steve O’Meagher, and how it broke new ground by having a Samoan protagonist.

Dr Sy Taffel presented a paper called Antisocial|Asocial|Associations: Mapping the Social in Social Media to the Australia and New Zealand Communication Association conference in Melbourne. The paper, which is being published in the peer reviewed conference proceedings, argued that media have always been social structures, so queried what’s new and different about the types of social connection made by social media? Dr Taffel used a unique combination of political economy, software studies and actor network theory approaches to answer this question, and argued that each approach reveals overlapping ways in which social media commodify and monetise social ties such as community and friendship. A particular focus was on Facebook, which famously claims in numerous marketing materials to be making the Web more ‘social’. Dr Taffel challenged the assumed meaning of the ‘social’ in ‘social media’, exploring existing definitions of the terms alongside the range of online content the term is understood to refer to.

Dr Allen Meek presented a paper to the ‘Future of Past: Representing the Holocaust, Genocide and Mass Trauma in the 21st Century’ Conference in Melbourne. The title of the paper was “Media, Trauma and Biopolitics”. Dr Meek argued that modern biopolitics, which attempts to control society at the level of biological life, provides an important perspective for understanding trauma as a model for extreme historical events. He explored the idea that while the Holocaust is commonly understood as a trauma for modern society, this can stop us from being able to see Nazi racial politics as an extreme version of something intrinsic to modern forms of power.

Dr Kim Worthington presented a paper at the Australasian Association of Literature ‘Literature and Affect’ Conference in Melbourne entitled “Confronting a forgotten past: Shame, guilt and blame in Jaspreet Singh’s Helium”. In interpreting Singh’s haunting 2013 novel, Dr Worthington’s paper engaged with the philosophical work of Paul Ricouer, whom she argued understands remembering and forgetting as not simply involuntary processes, but as ones that are often consciously willed and manipulated for political purposes. Her paper explored the complex relationships between memory and forgetting and the emotions of shame, guilt and blame. “Inevitably,” Dr Worthington said, “this also involves questions about the (im)possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness in both personal and national contexts.” The paper argued that what is needed for forgiveness and healing in dealing with historial trauma is more than a rational assessment of past (inherited) crimes: an emotional confrontation is also necessary, and Singh’s work suggests literature can provide this.

Dr Kevin Glynn presented a co-authored paper at the Institute of Australian Geographers/NZ Geographical Society Joint Conference held in Melbourne. Written with Julie Cupples of the University of Edinburgh, the paper was entitled ‘Reframing Indigeneity: The Difference an Indigenous Broadcaster Makes.’ It explored two incidents: police “terror raids” on Tuhoe in Te Urewera in 2007, and controversies over public pronouncements by Air New Zealand in 2013 about a company policy that prohibits employment of people with ta moko. Using these case studies to look at the differences between mainstream and Maori Television Service coverage, the paper argued that both events revealed contestation between competing visions of national identity, belonging and participation. While mainstream media trafficked heavily in racialised discourses of terror and securitisation in relation to the Urewera raids, Maori Television coverage drew upon grassroots counterdiscourses and counterknowledges that depicted the situation in the Ureweras very differently. By the time of the Air New Zealand controversy, Maori Television had developed around itself an active participatory culture of digitally engaged audiences making avid use of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The paper explored the forms of indigenous citizenship active within this new media environment to assess the contribution an indigenous broadcaster can make to challenging the epistemic violence inflicted through colonisation upon indigenous ways of knowing and being.

Dr Philip Steer presented a sole-authored conference paper at the ‘Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750-2000’ conference hosted by the Novel Studies research cluster at the University of Sydney. Entitled “Strategic Banality: The Work of the Prosaic in Novels of Early Settlement,” Dr Steer’s paper explored the generic instability of the early colonial Australian novel, specifically its tendency to veer from narrating the vicissitudes of settler life to detailing agricultural production and other concerns more commonly associated with political economy. He argued that the strategic assertion of colonial banality across a range of registers functioned to assert the Britishness of Australian settlement. That is, if the colony’s suitability for the British subject was most immediately conveyed through the portrayal of characters’ achievement of a settled, rural lifestyle, this was complemented at a societal level by the statistical assertion of the colonial capacity for steady, regular economic production. Paradoxically, therefore, asserting the prosaic nature of settlement can be seen as one of the most audacious and wide-ranging strategies of the colonial novel.

Essay key component of Walters Prize shortlisted artwork

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good oil

Image from Maddie Leach’s collaborative artwork, ‘If you find the good oil let us know’

A creative essay by School of English & Media Studies senior lecturer Dr Ingrid Horrocks is currently featuring as part of the Walters Prize exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery.

The essay forms a key part of Maddie Leach’s collaborative conceptual art project ‘if you find the good oil let us know’, which is a finalist in this year’s Walters Prize, New Zealand’s premier contemporary art award.  All four finalists are on display at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki until 12 October 2014.

The $50,000 Walters Prize, named after the late New Zealand artist Gordon Walters, is awarded for an outstanding work of contemporary New Zealand art produced and exhibited during the past two years. The prize aims to make contemporary art a more widely recognised and debated feature of our cultural life.

Dr Horrocks’ work of critical-creative prose  is the closing piece in the publication, ‘if you find the good oil let us know’, which is the culmination of Maddie Leach’s 2012 Govett-Brewster Aotearoa New Zealand Artist in Residence project of the same name. The project as a whole unfolds an imaginative narrative of whales, cement, art works, scientists, seafarers, migrations, and oil companies via a community of letter-writers and readers.

Dr Horrocks’s contribution works both as part of the artwork, and as the single critical response to the work as a whole. It also involves a recorded performance of her work, which serves as the audio narrative of the project in its next incarnation online in association with the Walters Prize exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery.

Maddie Leach is a senior lecturer and postgraduate coordinator for fine arts, in Massey University’s Whiti o Rehua – The School of Art at Wellington.

Link: http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/news/finalists-announced-for-the-walters-prize-2014-new-zealand%E2%80%99s-premier-contemporary-art-prize

Link: http://maddieleach.net http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/media/6032904/twp2014_catalogue.pdf