The following is the advertisement for the position of Lecturer or Senior Lecturer (Teaching) in Film at Victoria university of Wellington. To apply, and for further information, please click here.

• Do you have expertise in film production and industry experience in film?
• Are you able to teach film production at an undergraduate and postgraduate level?
• Do you have a critically reflective teaching practice?

Mō Te Herenga Waka – About Our University

Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington is a global-civic university with our marae at our heart. This iho draws off our heritage and is further defined by our tūrangawaewae, in particular Wellington, Aotearoa, and the Asia-Pacific, all of which are expressed in our position as Aotearoa New Zealand’s globally ranked capital city university.

Our core ethical values are respect, responsibility, fairness, integrity, and empathy. These core ethical values are demonstrated in our commitment to sustainability, wellbeing, inclusivity, equity, diversity, collegiality, and openness. With, and as, tangata whenua, we value Te Tiriti o Waitangi, rangatiratanga, manaakitanga, kaitiakitanga, whai mātauranga, whanaungatanga, and akoranga.

Kōrero mō te tūranga – About the role

Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington invites applications for a permanent full time position (1.0 FTE) as Lecturer or Senior Lecturer in Film production to begin in 2023. The appointee will have the opportunity to contribute to a vibrant critical and creative program in Film at Victoria, and to other academic and creative communities in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Job share (two 0.5 FTE positions) will be considered. Please indicate your preference in your application.

Ō pūmanawa – About you

We seek applications from people with expertise in film production and with significant experience in the film industry in Aotearoa New Zealand or Oceania. The successful candidate will have a PhD in Film or equivalent industry experience and a strong record of creative practice. We expect the appointee to contribute productively to fulfilling the University’s Treaty of Waitangi obligations. Candidates will need to show high quality and critically reflective teaching practice in film production—as Lecturer, evidence of the capacity to teach film production and supervise undergraduate and postgraduate students; as Senior Lecturer, previous experience teaching film production and supervising undergraduate and postgraduate students is required.

Ētahi kōrero hai āwhina i a koe – Why you should join our team

Victoria’s Film Programme has established a reputation as a centre of excellence for creative-practice, meeting high demand amongst students for film production teaching and activity. Its staff and students produce award-winning films and make strong contributions to the screen industries in Wellington and Aotearoa, helped in recent years by the highly visible Miramar Creative Centre, which houses the MFA (CP) in Film Production. This work is supported by extremely strong traditional research and teaching that provide the backbone for innovative creative practice. The Film Programme is committed to the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi and to diversity and inclusion in teaching and production work.

It’s December 2019. I’m about to present a paper at the CSAA conference at the University of Queensland. I’m in a spectacular lecture theatre where I saw the great Meaghan Morris present a paper just yesterday. But the story actually starts back in the 1990s.

My sojourns through the varied terrain of cultural studies began on the Gold Coast, when I took a double major in theatre and visual art at Griffith University. It was as incongruous as it sounds, a bunch of baby goths, stage kids and writers, all flung together finding harbour in a town that wasn’t known for the likes of us. All first-year students, back then, needed to enrol in a subject in their first semester called ‘The Arts in Perspective 1’ and I fully expected us to be quite firmly reminded that the arts were of very little importance; this was the beginning of the Howard era, after all. I was in the first cohort to pay extra for HECS under newly increased fees, and the mood of the country was moving. Pauline Hanson was screeching the airwaves and suddenly ‘refugee’ was a dirty word.

I was expecting to stay humble.

I remember the first lecture. It was a kind of welcome to uni address and then Dr Patricia Wise said something startling, ‘most of you will end up with a PhD.’ Through the next two semesters, she would guide us through a cornucopia of theory texts, which offered lenses to understand, or try to, the place of the artist, or just the place of us, within the world we were coming of age within. When Port Arthur’s bullets shattered our minds, we contextualised it through traditional gender roles and the harm these things can do. I, like many of my cohort, found voices to articulate things we had begun to notice but not yet really say, not on our own.

In a traditional structure of a one-hour lecture and two-hour tute, we learnt a kind of revolution. Instead of ill-formed feelings and anecdotes about our observations of the world, we learnt to communicate them as ideas, of some value – augmented by French theory even! For a bunch of Gold Coast misfits, arty budding intellectuals on the glitzy and seedy Glitter Strip, this was transformative.

I left Cultural Studies aside for two years – my passion was for art and drama, but when my honours year came hurtling towards me, theory returned, and with gusto. I devoured texts by Morris, Barthes, Probyn, Foucault, Spivak, Gatens, Hall, Broadhurst, and the ones we didn’t understand so easily, Deleuze and Guttari (which I always liked to round to D&G, like fashion provocateurs of the day Dolce e Gabanna), Agamben, and so many more. Again, who was there to champion this way of thinking that took our experiences and made them deep thoughts, and eventually works of art, but the same Dr Pat Wise, or Pat as she was colloquially known. I learnt how to tell high theory through storytelling, long before I’d heard of Autotheory.

Then a PhD beckoned with the roll of the new millennium. I’d just completed my honours degree and had become accustomed to this weave of theory and art. Pat became my supervisor.

Now, back to 2019, with the setting being UQ for the CSAA conference. I’m on a panel alongside my actual next-door neighbour – and we live in the mountains outside of the city so it’s quite remarkable, one of the circus performers-now-PhD- academics that I went to uni with, and two or so other

cultural theorists discussing their applications of theory to corporeal practice. One of my colleagues, who I now teach cultural studies alongside, sits to the side smiling.

The now-Associate Professor Pat Wise is watching a panel of presentations of at least three of her former students, all from that unexpected little Gold Coast enclave and I can’t quite imagine what seeing that fruition might feel like. She’s seen it all, from me, and from many, weaving through my Cultural Studies career like the roots of a rhizome.

I now teach Cultural Studies and have postgrad students of my own. I’m even the state rep for the CSAA, and I have some new research. It’s leaning on Lacan this time, and Femme theory. Afterwards she tells me ‘I was dead impressed.’ I impressed the impressive.

That’s the kind of thing that happens at a CSAA conference.

Dr Lola Meghann Montgomery is a senior lecturer in the Master of Creative Industries at SAE Institute. Her PhD was an exegesis and creative component, focusing on the lives experience of burlesque performance.

It was with great trepidation and much hope that I accepted a secondment as Academic Program Leader in University of Wollongong’s brand-new South-West Sydney campus, which was to be housed in a couple of floors of a Council building in the Liverpool CBD. For those unaccustomed to Sydney’s western and south-western suburbs beyond the recent incessant focus on Parramatta, Liverpool is about 25 kilometres from the centre of Sydney, a lower median income than the New South Wales average and could be classified as ‘super-diverse’ as no single ethnic group dominates.

Also worth noting are the growing cohort of young people, many of whom are children of migrants and refugees. Liverpool and nearby Fairfield are the two Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Sydney where most newly arrived refugees are resettled, leading to particular needs for housing, education, and employment infrastructure.

In other words, this new position would have been ideal for operationalising many conceptual tools in my growing scholarly arsenal on multiculturalism and its embodiment in the Australian context. I had also been writing my first monograph on food in inter-cultural contexts and was equally excited to expand my inner-city palate and foodie know-how. Despite these obvious intersections with my 1.5 generation migrant identity and academic pursuits, my first trip to Liverpool for early admission interviews for UOW’s Bachelor of Arts program turned out to be a checklist of privilege and positionality.

During the interviews themselves, I was heartened that so many students who hailed from racialised backgrounds were interested in pursuing an Arts degree. Some were especially interested in majoring in politics and international relations, while others were keen to explore teaching pathways alongside a major in cultural studies or sociology. This interest in understanding their world through the lens of the humanities existed despite the fact that many hailed from schools where ‘Culture and Society’ was not on offer as an HSC subject. They nonetheless understood how the vocabulary of a discipline akin to cultural studies could enable them to self-represent and claim belonging on behalf of their communities.

However, many were candid about how they had an uphill battle ahead convincing their parents about the value of an arts education. Still others had lived complex lives as always-already politicised subjects in Western Sydney and wanted to find the language to both articulate their experiences and advocate for better conditions for their families in Australia as well as in the Global South.

Stepping away from the campus and my teaching and governance hats, what I was less prepared for was the intensity of guilt I would experience in the course of being a walker/ethnographer/insider-outsider in the streets of Liverpool. This was the first time I encountered my own class and educational privilege vis-à-vis many people of colour who call western or south-western Sydney home. While I had been well-versed in the pedagogical and aesthetic dimensions of cultural diversity, my training and life experience did little to expose me to the habitus of these suburbs and the visceral reactions such exposure would evoke.

What I have been endeavouring to do for the last five years is learning from and collaborating with these communities rather than imposing my own understanding of what would work here. This constitutes very slow research and very patient teaching and my cultural studies training has equipped me for both. It means re-conceptualising cultural capital and what it means to be at home and continue to want to stay in a place that others see as deprived. It implies embracing ‘productive discomfort’, an idea that many cultural studies scholars and colleagues have actively practised and championed

Dr. Sukhmani Khorana is a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University.

LAST WEEK TO APPLY -2022 AFI RESEARCH COLLECTION FELLOWSHIP

RMIT’s AFI Research Collection, in partnership with RMIT Culture, and the Screen and Sound Cultures Research Group at RMIT University, is pleased to announce the 2022 AFI Research Collection Research Fellowship.

The AFIRC invites proposals from individuals wishing to undertake research that utilises the Collection’s resources and promotes the AFIRC. We actively encourage applicants who are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, from the CALD (Culturally and Linguistically Diverse) and/or DGSS (Diverse Genders, Sexes and Sexualities) communities and/or people living with disabilities, who meet the requirements of the Fellowship. The Fellowship is designed to showcase the unique holdings of the AFIRC, which include special collections, film stills, newspaper clippings and other significant artefacts from the Australian film and television industry.

The appointed Fellow will have access to the Collection under the guidance of the AFIRC staff. The Fellowship will provide a stipend of $5,000 (AUD) which includes travel costs if the recipient is not from Melbourne.

The Fellow will be required to participate in an accessible public event that engages on a topic related to their work. This could be in the form of an informal In-Conversation, or a panel style event and will be facilitated by RMIT Culture.

The AFI Research Collection Fellowship is open to individuals who have a demonstrated interest and experience in Australian screen culture and research through research outputs or AV outputs.

Applications close on 11:55 pm (AEST) Sunday 4 September 2022.

For further information, please see the following site.

There is a sculpture in the main street of Gundagai (NSW) that honours two Wiradjuri men, Yarri and Jacky Jacky, local heroes in the Great Flood of 1852.

The inscription notes that the Gundagai community, including Wiradjuri and descendants of those saved, honour and commemorate Yarri and Jacky Jacky who saved many lives. Unlike so many Australian monuments, this statue does not memorialise and legitimise colonialism or celebrate nationalism and white male ‘heroes’.

The monument is testament to the Wiradjuri men’s bravery and skill.

It asks many questions.

Unveiled in 2017, on the 165th anniversary of the flood, the bronze sculpture depicts the two men and a bark canoe used to save 69 townspeople from the floodwaters. At the time, Gundagai’s population was 250. It was estimated that 89 people died in the flood.

Who’s counted and who went uncounted?

The flood remains one of the deadliest natural disasters ever recorded in Australia. After unveiling the sculpture, MP Michael McCormack tweeted, the ‘statue marks one of the greatest acts of bravery in Australian history’.[i] Even more so given Australia’s racist, violent colonial history. Wiradjuri had warned the colonisers not to build the town on the flood plains of the Murrumbidgee River. Their knowledge of Country was ignored.

The rescue continued over several days and nights, yet only Yarri and Jacky Jacky are named. Although it is noted that other Wiradjuri joined the rescue, their names are lost to (public) history. The colonial records resound with generic names for Aboriginal people, like Jacky Jacky, erasing and denying people’s uniqueness, humanity and relationships to people and place.

The sculpture, unmissable on the main street of Gundagai, reminds even the most forgetful onlooker of colonialism. Its presence recounts and recalls local history. As Roslyn Boles, a descendant of Yarri, told the ABC News, ‘Yarri and Jacky Jacky could’ve walked away and said, ‘We told them, we told them and they decided not to listen’, but they didn’t.’[ii] Standing before the monument I was dumbstruck. Why? Despite the violence, land theft, oppression and ignoring of Wiradjuri warnings, they risked their lives.

The memorial sets me into a reflective mood. It unsettles, troubles and disturbs my trajectory. We were heading to Tumut, stopped over to grab a coffee and now I’m waylaid by a bronze sculpture. Borrowing from Meaghan Morris, ‘it raises familiar questions about the past represented in the present’, but it does so in the context of everyday activities. Buying a coffee, grocery shopping or tourists meandering along. Unlike the plaque on the Henry Parkes Motor Inn, Tenterfield, which honours a ‘founding father of the modern nation’, the Gundagai legend engenders altogether different effects of place.[iii]

A legend in which Aboriginal men are celebrated for their courage, ingenuity and compassion. 

Aunty Sony Piper, Wiradjuri Elder and member of the ‘Yarri and Jacky Jacky Sculpture Committee,’ said:

‘To be Aboriginal men, there’s not many statues around and we wanted that to be in Gundagai.

For a lot of the tourists to come through and see about these heroes – these two Aboriginal heroes.’[iv]

On Saturday the 25th of June 2022, to mark the 170-year anniversary of the flood, the Gundagai Aboriginal community presented the Yarri & Jacky Jacky Commemoration Corroboree. Writing for NITV, organiser Joe Williams wrote: ‘Anyone who was in attendance would agree, that the spirit of the Wiradjuri heroes, and our many ancestors, were with us.’[v]

The statue slowed me down; interrupted my course. Cultural studies, and CSAA, taught me to value everyday disturbances. To not brush aside the affects or pass on by, but to follow the disquiet. 

[i] https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2017/06/13/wiradjuri-heroes-honoured-gundagai-sculpture

[ii] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-27/gundagai-flood-wiradjuri-heroes-yarri-and-jacky-jacky-celebrated/101184050

[iii] 1988, ‘At Henry Parkes Motel’, Cultural Studies, 2:1, 1-47.

[iv] https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/nitv-news/article/2017/06/13/wiradjuri-heroes-honoured-gundagai-sculpture

[v] https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2022/07/04/yarri-jacky-jacky-corroboree-one-proudest-moments-my-life

Lisa Slater is an Associate Professor, University of Wollongong

2022 is the 30th Anniversary of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA)—an important milestone for reflecting on and celebrating cultural studies research, teaching and scholarship in the region.   

RMIT University’s School of Media & Communication is proud to announce it will be hosting the CSAA 30th Anniversary Conference in Melbourne (1 – 3 December).   

CSAA will be celebrating this milestone at its 2022 conference in Melbourne, hosted by RMIT University, with keynotes, historical and forward-planning roundtables, and plenty of opportunities to present, network, engage, socialise and recognise the important role of cultural studies in the community. 

Themes 

CSAA2022 has three themes:  

• Everyday Icons   
• Pasts and Futures   
• National Interests

 The conference will host papers and panels in any of these three themes as well as general cultural studies topics.  

Plenary roundtables

As part of the anniversary celebrations, CSAA 2022 is hosting several Q&A-style plenary roundtables with key cultural studies and community participants, including: 

(1) Gough Whitlam 50th Anniversary (An Everyday Icon) 

(2) Futures of Academic Publishing

(3) Histories and Trajectories of Cultural Studies  

Call for papers 

The organising committee are now calling for proposals for papers and panels (of 3-4 presentations)–the portal will remain open until Friday 5 August (extended).    

For more information on the conference, the themes and for proposal submissions, please see the conference site at: https://www.CSAA2022.net and the attached flyer.

Congress of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences

This year, CSAA will be participating in the first annual Congress of HASS (CHASS), bringing 21 Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences conferences to Melbourne during the same fortnight.  To accommodate the anticipated overlaps between conferences, CSAA will be offering day-rate and event registrations so delegates attending multiple conferences are not financially burdened and can manage the exciting schedule.  More information about the Congress can be found at: https://www.chass.org.au/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=239946&module_id=502484 

On behalf of the organising committee:  Rob Cover (chair), Anna Hickey-Moody, Mark Gibson and Jay Daniel Thompson. 

RMIT University’s School of Media & Communication is proud to announce it will be hosting the CSAA 30th Anniversary Conference in Melbourne (1-3 December).

2022 is the 30th Anniversary of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA)—an important milestone for reflecting on and celebrating cultural studies research, teaching and scholarship in the region.

The 30th anniversary conference will feature keynotes, historical and forward-planning roundtables, and plenty of opportunities to present, network, engage, socialise and recognise the important role of cultural studies in the community.

Themes

CSAA2022 has three themes: Everyday Icons; Pasts and Futures; National Interests.

The conference will host papers and panels in any of these three themes and

Call for papers

The organising committee are now calling for proposals for papers and panels (of 3-4 presentations).

Abstracts are now due by Friday 29 July.

For more information on the conference, the themes and for proposal submissions, please see the conference site at: https://www.CSAA2022.net

On behalf of the organising committee: Rob Cover, Anna Hickey-Moody, Mark Gibson and Jay Daniel Thompson.

Like so many, I came to cultural studies after my undergraduate degree, my own being in international relations and anthropology at the University of Sydney. I moved back to the northern rivers, and it was at Southern Cross University where I was introduced to cultural studies by Baden Offord at Southern Cross University. I had been seeking an advisor for an Honours project on surfing as a practice of intercultural connection. My project wasn’t revolutionary, but Baden’s guidance – along with that of Erika Kerruish, Adele Wessell, Kim Satchell, and Rob Garbutt – towards theories and methods that emphasised the role of ethics, care and lived experience, were my introduction to what cultural studies could be.

Further shaped by feminism and queer theory, the politics and requirement for activism that underpins these areas emphasised the activist aspects of cultural studies to me. The cultural studies teaching program at Southern Cross University really is wonderful.

It was this grounding that led me to understand cultural studies as a practice – it is something I do rather than a field I am in – that impacts the decisions I made about research questions, methodology, relationships, and research translation. As someone who went on to spend many years in sport and exercise science Schools and Departments (including for my PhD), thinking of research as a practice has been essential for maintaining clarity about my research focus and parameters while working outside of a HASS institutional context.

Cultural studies’ focus on everyday life meant that sport, exercise and leisure offer rich worlds to explore. Sport, exercise and leisure intersect with diverse contexts and issues, including identity, subjectivity, literature, media, policy, education, health, environments, industry, and so much more. My own contributions to the knowledge in these sport-focused disciplines has about everyday experiences of recreational sport, exercise and leisure, and the ways people make meaning of their lives, and of the world, through various forms of participation.

Thinking of cultural studies as a practice has strongly influenced how I’ve approached teaching. Working in sport and exercise science contexts meant that when it came to teaching, my students were focused on their vocational goals. A degree is a pathway to accreditation. Students working in physiology and anatomy labs, largely took HASS courses only because they were compulsory. Understandably, most of these students didn’t care what cultural studies is. And yet, the critical questions about definitions, histories, discrimination, and inclusion that were raised in these courses were essential to students’ education as future allied health professionals and sport facilitators.

Following Graeme Turner’s advice, I embraced the unruly-ness of cultural studies to ‘generate excitement amongst students about what cultural studies can do for them’, and always kept in mind Baden Offord’s reminder that pedagogy can ‘activate students’. That is, to help students discover methods and forms of analysis and communication that they can apply in their work (and lives) to improve things for the benefit of diverse people. This was also a productive a way of learning about sport for me, because in their excitement, students shared so much about their own sporting lives in classes.

Th ethical imperative I found in cultural studies – that we should be engaged with the effects of our research and teaching – has been essential to my scholarship. It constantly reminds me that what we produce is as important as what we know and how we came to know it.

Bio: Rebecca Olive is a Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University. Her research explores recreational sport and leisure in everyday life with a particular focus on swimming and surfing in coastal and ocean ecologies. Influenced by feminist cultural studies approaches, Rebecca is interested in how people navigate in their relationships to other people and to the multispecies communities they’re immersed in. Her work advocates for the importance of recreational sport and leisure in human-environmental health and wellbeing. You can read more about this work at movingoceans.com.

This goal of this PhD is conducting social research on the Australian 5G rollout. The PhD is associated with an ARC Discovery Project called ‘5G and the Future of Public Communications’.

The successful candidate will work with and be supervised and mentored by Associate Professor Rowan Wilken and Dr. James Meese from the School of Media & Communication at the Melbourne (CBD) campus of RMIT University, and collaborate with Professor Catherine Middleton (Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada).

For further information, please click here.

It wasn’t long after I graduated when I attended my first CSAA conference in the early 1990s, so I was still quite junior. I’d been reading cultural theory for some years but, completing a thesis in intellectual history, it had never occurred to me that cultural studies was a thing, let alone a thing for me. I hadn’t been part of that generation that had forged cultural studies in Australia.

I’d been to several conferences in other areas and had found them to be clubs that I hadn’t been invited to join. The CSAA conferences in the 1990s, on the other hand, were welcoming. Sure, there was a discourse I hadn’t mastered, and there were debates and histories that were still mysteries, but this mattered less.

I discovered early on that cultural studies operated as a relatively open intellectual space, and this was especially important for postgraduates and early career researchers. Indeed, I would argue that, after that initial phase of the constitution of cultural studies here, it became a space where HDRs and ECRs could play significant roles. This was institutionalised in the CSAA executive and in Continuum.

It’s not that there weren’t celebrities in cultural studies – these were people who had created this space. But I remember that, at an early conference in Fremantle, I found myself sitting with luminaries such as Meaghan Morris and Ien Ang, feeling a bit weird and, yet, at home. And that defined cultural studies for me.

Cultural studies has long agonised over whether it is a discipline. It certainly has not had the kind of institutional solidity that other disciplines have. This has produced problems, and often threatened the viability of cultural studies, but at the time this fluidity offered opportunities for younger academics and students. The absence of an extensive institutional basis meant that most people who gathered at the CSAA conference came from somewhere else. Cultural studies was not what most people had studied or taught.

For me, the CSAA conference was an exploratory space, where people often played with ideas and material they did not deploy in workaday university life. This is what drew me in. There was always a different vibe at cultural studies conferences – perhaps carnivalesque is too strong – but conversations amongst postgrads and ECRs often centred around the ‘stars’: how they looked, performed, whether they disappointed. Indeed, I gave a conference paper on conferences one year which argued that gossip, gurus and groupies were crucial to the ‘communitas’ of the field. 

To foreground the degree of open-ness I found is not to suggest that cultural studies conferences were utopian spaces. They had hierarchies, feuds and arseholes. I remember early on I approached someone who had just given a keynote and said it was great: he put me in my place, saying, ‘as if I need your approval’. I shrank away. But the relative flatness of relations gave me my most pleasurable moments, when a feisty female student tore shreds off a pompous senior male (sadly not the one above). I cheered inside.

But that’s an account of a time past. I can’t say that the fluidity of cultural studies has been so advantageous over the last 15 years or so, but then I can no longer claim to experience the excitement of discovering such a space for the first time. The absence of the institutional solidity that disciplines like sociology have leaves a big question mark over the future of cultural studies. But one thing is certain: postgrads and ECRs must be at its heart for it to flourish.

Bio: Greg Noble is Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He was a member of the CSAA executive (1999-2006), ran its newsletter for several years and helped organise 2 conferences (1999, 2016), and an editor of Continuum (2007-2015).