Vale Professor Tom O’Regan

Posted July 17, 2020 by CSAA

Dear colleagues

In the midst of these dark times, I am sorry to pass on further sad news with the passing today of our dear colleague and long-time CSAA member, Professor Tom O’Regan. Tom will be known to many of you for his work in Australian screen studies and policy, and his co-founding and long-term editorship of our association-affiliated journal Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies. This journal remains an important and high-regarded venue for CSAA members work, and Tom’s leadership in co-founding this journal, and service in editing it between 1987 and 1995, is reflective of his generative contributions to this community.

For those of us who worked with and knew Tom personally, he was a treasured colleague, and a kind and generous mentor to many. In his various roles as Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, including a term as Head of School, Tom did much to encourage collaborative work and to foster a strong sense of community.

This work is more urgent than ever during the ongoing maelstrom of the pandemic, when many of our members are finding themselves in dire situations. Between the Indigenous Lives Matters protests, the HASS fees spike, the ongoing outbreaks, and now the announcements of sector layoffs, we know many of you are individually struggling. So we need collective spaces like that of the CSAA more than ever, and please know that the CSAA in turn is teaming with the other HASS associations to co-ordinate and consolidate our responses to these ongoing issues.

I am grateful to have had the benefit of Tom’s insight for many years, and I know that many members of the list will be saddened to hear of his passing. So I hope that the CSAA community he did so much to foster and sustain will continue to be a support to us all as together we face the times ahead.

On behalf of the CSAA, I extend my deepest sympathies to all Tom’s family, friends and colleagues.

Elizabeth Stephens

President, Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

Sukhmani Khorana: Migrants and food during COVID-19: Stories of Destitution, Enterprise and Solidarity

Posted June 8, 2020 by CSAA

My social media feeds over the last couple of months have been highlighting stories of temporary migrants and international students who have been left stranded during the pandemic by a mix of circumstance and policy. One of these posts, from the Federation of Ethnic Communities Council of Australia (FECCA), called attention to a recent Fairfax media article that began with a story of a Colombian chef. While he has lived in Australia for ten years and paid his fair share of taxes, he and his young family are adrift after he was stood down from his job at a Townsville restaurant.

The irony of a food worker unable to put three meals on the table is not lost on me. What is more than merely ironic is Australia’s bipartisan defence of multiculturalism on the grounds of enrichment of local culture (primarily through food in and out of the home), and the institutional abandonment of the very people who are still too precarious to claim their dues.

Meanwhile, several stories have also emerged of ‘ethnic restaurants’, amongst others types of food establishments, turning into social enterprises of a sort during the crisis. Many of these are using crowd-funding campaigns to support their efforts to feed temporary migrants and overseas students who have been rendered jobless. This is undoubtedly a better demonstration of intra-community care and migrant solidarities than seen during the Indian international student crisis of 2009-2010. At that time, migrants who had been living in Australia for a while and characterised as the ‘model minority’ were pitted against disenchanted students. In the contemporary moment of crisis, groups such as Sikh Volunteers Australia have extended their support beyond vulnerable non-citizens. The Project on Channel Ten, and other mainstream media platforms, have featured stories of this cluster of enterprising migrant volunteers as they are seen cooking curries for firefighters during the bushfires earlier this year, as well as dropping off meal boxes to hundreds of elderly citizens forced into quarantine in the face of COVID-19.

Before March 2020, when coronavirus-related local shutdowns were a distant reality, many enterprising Australians were using #IWillEatWithYou to champion Chinese restaurants that were rapidly losing clientele. On the one hand, this abandonment of Chinese-Australian food establishments has now morphed into daily instances of racial abuse towards Asian Australians. On the other, using food to show solidarity towards racialized groups has a longer history in Australia and comparable immigrant nations, as I explore in my book, The Tastes and Politics of Inter-cultural Food in Australia. For instance, after the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States in 2016, several groups organized to share food with their neigbours, immigrants and refugees. One such group is the ‘Syria Supper Club’ in northern New Jersey which organised weekly dinners where Syrian refugees were breaking bread with people in the area who had signed up online.

Give this history, what’s new is that many of these communities, who may have been targeted by eruptions of hate speech and/or violence in the past are coming forth to assist those rendered most materially vulnerable now.

What these tales of precarity and agency tell us is that migrants, like any other demographic in Australia, are not a homogeneous bunch. Often recruited into the workforce of this country to be productive ‘cogs’ in the wheel, they can be rendered marginal and destitute when the machinery malfunctions, but can also rise above the instrumentalising discourse of productivity through compassionate acts of volunteering during a crisis. The offering of help, especially via food, is not confined to migrants who have the material resources to do so. In addition to be being at the frontline of the crisis and needing assistance, refugees across the world are familiar with the exigencies of extraordinary times, and have also been volunteering their cooking, shopping and sowing services.

So what is new about migrants and food, especially in a settler colonial multicultural society like Australia in the midst of the pandemic? The challenges of COVID-19 might be unprecedented for many social groups, but they have been experienced in one form or another by most migrants and refugees. Also, while many academic studies and migrant advocacy bodies have been calling for greater attention to listening and responding to their voices and recognising their agency, the current circumstances make these calls even more pressing. What we need isn’t yet another ‘Harmony Day’ that celebrates food from different cultures, but doesn’t talk to those serving the food about anything other than their enriching spices and costumes. Nor do we want to fall into the simplistic trap of condemning all migrant-initiated food initiatives as pandering to white tastes.

This insight on migrants and refugees as more than mere economic contributors or burdens on the state has the potential to impact multicultural policy and on-the-ground action. Instead of abandoning multiculturalism as an ideal and cornerstone of nation-building in these times of a global upsurge in xenophobia and populism, this is an opportunity to re-fashion it as resilient and enriching the civic fabric. Local councils in particular can play a leading role in working with migrants and refugees in their communities to facilitate their enterprises during and beyond the pandemic. In the realm of advocacy, what continues to be a gaping hole is the absence of explicitly-articulated solidarities towards those facing racism in the present moment. While prominent Chinese-Australians have issued several appeals in this regard, it is now up to the rest of us to back them up, and not merely eat their food or at their restaurants.

Short bio

Sukhmani Khorana is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at the Young and Resilient Research Centre at Western Sydney University. Previously, she was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong. Sukhmani has published extensively on diasporic cultures, multi-platform refugee narratives, and the politics of empathy. She is the author of The Tastes and Politics of Inter-Cultural Food in Australia (RLI).

CFP for journal special issue on the politics of sex and drugs

Posted June 7, 2020 by CSAA

Studies of the relationship between sex and drug use have historically been dominated by scholarly perspectives from the medical sciences and public health. This body of literature has tended to focus on the causes and motivations behind drug use in sexual contexts, as well as the consequences, risks and potential harms. While contributing to understandings of the health-related dimensions of sexualised drug use, these accounts tend to include a sub-text of pathology which constrains thinking in this field. Moreover, existing research has almost exclusively focussed on sexualised drug use within so-called ‘risky’ populations, predominantly men who have sex with men (MSM), and relies on the assumption that MSM involved in ‘chemsex’ are suffering from ‘internalised homophobia’1,2 and engaging in self-harm.3 Given the power of medical discourse to shape public views and norms surrounding sexuality, it is crucial to explore how the phenomenon of sexualised drug use might be understood outside the terms of ‘pathology,’ ‘risk’ and ‘deviance’.

A growing body of critical social research about the politics of sex and drugs has emerged in the last two decades.4-9 Recent special issues in the fields of alcohol and other drug (AOD) studies and sexual health have addressed the topic of sexualised drug use in relation to notions of pleasure,10 ‘chemsex’,11 ‘party and play’12, with particular reference to the sexual cultures of gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM).13 The proposed special issue seeks to extend this corpus by challenging conventional understandings and adopting a critical, interdisciplinary perspective on the confluence of sex and drugs in contexts that include but also extend beyond GBMSM sexual cultures. Building on the existing AOD literature, the special issue will present interdisciplinary research that engages critically with sex and drugs, and their place in social life and culture. Its ambit includes papers that are theoretical in nature, close readings of key cultural texts, critical engagements with empirical data such as surveys, interviews and field notes, or a combination of all of these. We would welcome papers addressing questions such as:

● What are the gendered and sexualised dynamics of drug use in sexual contexts? How do these dynamics shape understandings of the body?
● How do other characteristics such as class, ethnicity and disability affect drug use in sexual contexts? How can we think critically about the complex interplay of these characteristics in relation to drug use? What are their implications for policy and practice?

● How does drug use in queer spaces contribute to practices of self-making and community-building in LGBTQ cultures?
● Given the long-standing connections between sexual minoritisation and the desire to chemically alter bodily experience, how does drug use among LGBTQ people disrupt normative regimes of sexuality and gender?
● In what ways have discourses about the risks and pleasures of sex on drugs changed over time?
● What are the broader cultural implications of current public health responses to ‘chemsex’?
● How is the use of drugs in sexual contexts presented in literary, artistic, audiovisual, pornographic and other cultural contexts?
● In what ways might conventional notions of sexual consent be transformed by the use of drugs?
● How might licit drug use in sexual contexts shape or transform discourses on illicit drugs and sexual practices?
● How do contemporary sociocultural, economic and legal discourses of drug use — such as debates about pill-testing and overdoses at music festivals in Australia; decriminalisation and drug policy liberalisation in the EU and North America and increasingly punitive responses in the Philippines — shape discourses of sex and sexuality?
● How does the policing of drug use shape sexual practices?
These suggested topics are a guide only and we will also consider pieces addressing other conceptual, material and sociocultural issues related to the politics of sex and drugs. We would also welcome review articles, and interviews and commentary that present more discursive approaches to the topic. Papers which are not informed by a critical perspective (i.e. papers that present clinical data about drug use patterns without critically exploring the categories used to collect such data) are unlikely to be considered suitable for this special issue. We aim to include a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, and encourage authors to challenge and transverse disciplinary boundaries in their writing.

We will be submitting abstracts to the journal Body and Society to form a special issue as per their guidelines. However, should it be unsuccessful as a team we would work with authors to find a suitable journal.

Potential contributors should send an abstract of up to 200 words to chemsex@manchester.ac.uk by 24 July 2020. Please include with your response details of authors’ institutional affiliation(s), contact details and brief bios.

CFP: Humour at Work: Applications, Industries and Economies

Posted June 7, 2020 by CSAA

Humour at Work: Applications, Industries and Economies

27^th Conference of the Australasian Humour Studies Network

February 3-5, 2021

Massey University, Wellington Campus, Aotearoa New Zealand

Under the current conditions, it is very difficult for any of us to make confident predictions about the future, especially with regard to international travel and the status of gatherings. However, the organising committee for the 2021 conference of the Australasian Humour Studies Network (AHSN) has decided to proceed with the first stages of invitation on the cautious but optimistic basis that our meeting in Wellington, New Zealand in February 2021 will be possible.

At this stage, we are inviting submissions, in particular, from our colleagues based in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia on the optimistic assumption that Trans-Tasman travel will again be possible at some stage in the next 8 months. We also welcome submissions from further afield, but please note that entrance to New Zealand is currently closed to all non-residents, and there is no indication when the border is likely to open again.

Should the situation not improve by the end of 2020, we will then consider the possibility of taking the conference online in place of a physical meeting.

Keynote Presenters

(Please note that the physical attendance of keynote presenters will be contingent upon the travel policies of the NZ government in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. These are liable to change over time and cannot be predicted)

Dr Christelle Pare (Head of Research and Development, Just for Laughs/Juste pour Rire)

Dr Barbara Plester (Senior Lecturer of Management, University of Auckland);

More keynote presenters to be confirmed.

Although often imagined to be aligned with the leisurely or the everyday—something to be pursued for its own sake and own pleasures—in practice, humour is often big business. Whether understood in terms of the international comedy industry, the role of humour in corporate contexts, or its instrumentalist application in a range of industries and activities, humour can be alternately lucrative or costly. Moreover, comedy is not just profitable, but also often shaped by profits as new technologies, institutions and economies change the way we laugh. From the rise of the Netflix stand-up comedy special to the advent of a new breed of online celebrity-comedians, shifts in political economy have had consequences not just for where and when we consume comedy, but also for the types of humour that circulate and which of them can find an audience.

For the 27^th meeting of the Australasian Humour Studies Network, we would like to encourage presenters to follow the money, and consider the different ways in which humour can be thought to have either sold out or cashed up. How has humour been implicated in a wide range of business practices and cultures? How has humour been put to work to earn its keep? What changes have arisen from the increasing professionalisation of comedy? How might humour be implicated or understood in light of our wider economic context?

**Please note that papers and presentations that do not directly address the theme of ‘Humour at Work’ are more than welcome. As the official conference of the AHSN, we welcome researchers working on any and all aspects of the study of humour.

We would like to invite proposals for 20 minute presentations. We welcome contributors who hail from a broad range of disciplines and fields of study: media and cultural studies, linguistics, fine arts, psychology, communication, education, literary studies, politics and political science, business studies, history, geography, sociology, theatre and performance, to name a few.

We especially welcome papers from research students of their work in progress, and as usual there will be a limited number of scholarships awarded as registration fee waivers for the best student proposals.

We would also like to extend a particular welcome to contributors from outside the university, especially those who are involved in the production and distribution of comedy.

The 2021 conference of the AHSN invites papers that explore the industrial and economic aspects of humour, including but not limited to:

The political economics of comedy production and distribution
Joking about business and work
Humour’s relationship to wider political economic contexts
Applications of humour in workplace settings
Comedy as art, business and vocation
The professionalization of comedy
The role of humour in workplace cultures
Comedy industries and technologies

Abstract deadline and details

All proposals will be blind reviewed by members of the AHSN Review Panel. If you are interested in presenting at the conference, please submit a 250 word abstract with your name, e-mail address, and affiliation through the AHSN website submission portal at https://ahsn.org.au/abstracts/. Any other enquires regarding the event should also be addressed to 2021AHSN@gmail.com.

For further information about the conference, please consult the conference website (currently under construction!) at https://ahsn-conference-2021.netlify.app/

Important dates

Submission of abstracts opens: 15 May 2020

Close of submissions considered for Research Scholarships: 1 August 2020

Close of general submissions: 1 September 2020

Notifications of acceptance: 28 September 2020

Conference Organisers

Massey University: Nicholas Holm, Bryce Galloway

Victoria University of Wellington: Meredith Marra, Stephen Skalicky

CFP: Celebrity Studies Special Edition, “Children and Celebrities”

Posted June 2, 2020 by CSAA

Deadline: August 7, 2020.

The entertainment industries create the most widely circulated popular images of children and childhood, and yet the role of children in celebrity studies warrants further study. As John Mercer and Jane O’Connor (2017) point out, the intersection between Childhood Studies and Celebrity Studies has been gaining traction in recent years, highlighting a tension between the dominant discourses of innocence surrounding children, and the highly competitive commercial imperatives of celebrity culture.

New participatory entertainment ecologies have created new opportunities for child performers, leading to the rise of new kinds of child celebrities and surrounding reception cultures. For instance, on YouTube, the world’s most popular user-generated video streaming service, some of the most successful celebrities are children: eight year old Ryan Kaji – a North American child who reviews toys for the channel ‘Ryan’s World’ (formerly ‘Ryan ToysReview’) – was the highest-earning YouTube personality of the year in both 2018 (Statista, 2019) and 2019 (Berg, 2019).

The child on screen, the child viewer, and the child star continue to be influenced by concepts of childhood that first emerged in the 19^th century, eliciting discourses of harm and protection and attracting waves of moral panic in different eras. These public debates most often reveal more about adult sensibilities around often nostalgic notions of childhood than they do about children themselves. As Karen Lury puts it, “the essential understanding of the child here is the child as being rather than becoming”(2005: 314), a subject lacking agency, which leads Hugh Cunningham to caution “we need to distinguish between children as human beings and childhood as a shifting set of ideas” (2005: 1). In the current cultural moment and in prior eras, the categories of child and adult are mutually reinforcing ideals that are articulated and reflected in a range of distinctive ways through celebrity culture. For example, since the world went into lockdown, the family home has taken centre stage for live broadcasts and social media feeds, and as a result viewers have been inundated with images of celebrities in isolation with their children.

There is more cultural evidence around childhood as a cultural concept than the lived experiences of children, a distinction which becomes key when considering children as fans of child and adult celebrities. In the field of Fandom Studies, Kyra Hunting notes the tendency to examine adolescent and teen media fans at the expense of children. She suggests this is partly due to practical, methodological reasons around collecting data, but argues it also reveals a resistance to framing children’s participatory media engagement as a form of fandom. This is despite the fact that “the playing child” functions as a “model for fandom” studies (Hills, 2002: 9). As such, we need to be mindful of how the child audience is addressed by star vehicles and paratexts, compared with what children actually do as fans, even (or particularly) if this does not accord with teen and adult models of fandom, and what intergenerational modes might be in play.

We seek original essays of 6-8000 words that address children and celebrities through an interdisciplinary approach, across a range of media forms and eras, for a special issue of Celebrity Studies (prospective publication 2023, pending the journal’s review of abstracts).

We will be looking for internationalisation, a range of scholarly experiences, gender balance, and that each of the abstracts tackles their topic or research question through broad and dynamic celebrity intersections.

Topics that the articles may address include, but are not limited to:

Examination of specific child stars or celebrities
Fandom around child stars, among children and/or adults
Child fans of adult stars
On and off-screen dynamics between child stars and their co-stars
Child celebrities and their online persona
‘Fur babies’: celebrity companion animals as ‘children’
Intersectional explorations of gender, race, and/or sexuality around child stars, from their youth through to adulthood
Nostalgia around child stars of the past
Intergenerational spectatorship and child celebrities
Public discourses around child star breakdowns
Acting and screen performance
Ageing child stars
Children on reality TV
The child actor industry
Child actors in adult film and television
Celebrity families in music, film, television and social media cultures
Child labour and consent
Child stars and stalkers
Children of celebrities
Children, celebrity culture, and moral panic
Child stars and merchandising
Children, celebrities and genre
Adult stars who feature in children’s film and television

Please send proposals of 300 words and a 50 word author bio to Djoymi Baker djoymi.baker@rmit.edu.au, Jessica Balanzategui jbalanzategui@swin.edu.au, or Diana Sandars sandars@unimelb.edu.au by 7 August 2020.

Djoymi Baker is a Lecturer in Media and Cinema Studies at RMIT University, Australia. She is a prize-winning writer on topics such as genre studies, fandom and myth in popular culture. Djoymi is the author of To Boldly Go: Marketing the Myth of Star Trek (I. B. Tauris, 2018) and the co-author of The Encyclopedia of Epic Films (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). Her current research examines children’s film and television history.

Jessica Balanzategui is a Lecturer in Cinema and Screen Studies at Swinburne University of Technology and a Chief Investigator at the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies. Her research examines screen genres across film, television and digital media for and about children, and the impact of technological and industrial change on entertainment cultures. Jessica is the author of The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), and the founding editor of Amsterdam University Press’s book series, Horror and Gothic Media Cultures. Jessica is also an editor of Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media.

Diana Sandars is a Lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she teaches courses in Screen, Gender, Digital Cultures, Social Justice and Cultural Studies. Diana has a research focus on the child in, and subject of, screen media. Diana is the author of What A Feeling: The Hollywood Musical After MTV (Intellect, forthcoming).

References

Berg, M, 2019, “The highest paid YouTube stars of 2019.” Forbes 18 December. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/12/18/the-highest-paid-youtube-stars-of-2019-the-kids-are-killing-it/#446f8a3338cd (accessed 19 December 2019).

Cunningham, Hugh, 2005, Children and childhood in western society since 1500, New York: Routledge.

Hills, Matt, 2002, Fan Cultures, London: Routledge.

Hunting, Kyra, 2019, “Finding the child fan: A case for studying children in fandom studies,” Journal of Fandom Studies, Vol.7, No. 2, pp. 93-111.

Lury, Karen, 2005, “The Child in Film and Television,” Screen, Vol. 46, No. 3, Autumn, pp. 307-314.

Mercer, John, and Jane O’Connor, 2017, Childhood and Celebrity, London: Routledge.

Statista, 2019, “Most popular YouTube channels as of September 2019, ranked by number of subscribers (in millions).” Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/277758/most-popular-youtube-channels-ranked-by-subscribers/(accessed 01 December 2019).

Graeme Turner’s new collection and an interview

Posted May 13, 2020 by CSAA

We are delighted to share an interview with Graeme by Adrian Athique, recently conducted in the currently virtual offices of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

The interview focuses on Graeme’s new collection, Essays in Media and Cultural Studies: In transition. This wide-ranging interview deals not only with the book, but with the state of cultural and media studies in Australia more broadly, including the condition of higher education.

The link for the interview can be found here: https://iash.uq.edu.au/article/2020/04/media-and-cultural-studies-transition-interview-graeme-turner

The link for the book itself is here: https://www.routledge.com/Essays-in-Media-and-Cultural-Studies-In-Transition/Turner/p/book/9780367338961

Congratulations to Graeme on the publication of this important new book!

Applications open: ‘Schooling, Parenting and Ethnicity: Asian Migration and Australian Education’ PhD scholarship

Posted May 4, 2020 by CSAA

Scholarship code: 2021_080

About the Project

Asian migration is transforming many aspects of life in migrant-based societies such as Australia. In education, an arena of aspiration and anxiety for many parents, social anxieties are increasingly ethnicised drawing on simplistic stereotypes of ‘Asian cultures’. The children of Asian migrants are disproportionately successful in Australian education, but are there different Asian and Western approaches to parenting? Domestic education policies are an important part of this social context. The acceleration of Asian migration has coincided with changes in Australia’s education system such as the greater prevalence of selective schooling and the marketization of education.

This project seeks a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the relationship between ethnicity and schooling and the pedagogical role of parenting within this dynamic by comparatively examining the educational practices and values of families of Chinese-, Indian- and Anglo-Australian backgrounds with primary school-aged children. It will explore how ethnicity, socio-economic status, length of residency and other factors, affect parenting choices regarding education. The study will also examine the commonalities and differences within and between these groups.

While the broader study examines these issues in terms of schooling, the PhD project will be geared towards how parental influence extends into students’ choice of tertiary study focusing on the impact of Asian migration at this level of education, with the successful candidate having the flexibility to develop a project that aligns with the aims of the broader study. Based at the Institute for Culture and Society (https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics) at Western Sydney University, the candidate will be supervised by Professor Megan Watkins and Professor Greg Noble, with associate supervision from Associate Professor Christina Ho, University of Technology Sydney.

What does the Scholarship provide?

* Domestic candidates will receive a tax-free stipend of $27,094 (AUD) per annum for up to 3 years to support living costs, supported by the Research Training Program (RTP) Fee Offset.

* Support for training, conference attendance, fieldwork and additional research costs as approved by the Institute for Culture and Society.

International applicants are not eligible to apply for this scholarship.

How to Apply

For details on how to apply, and for more information including the eligibility criteria, please see the Western Sydney University Website: https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/schools/grs/scholarships/current_scholarships/current_scholarships/ics_schooling,_parenting_and_ethnicity_asian_migration_and_australian_education

Applications close 31 May 2020, at 11:59pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT).

Media International Australia – Extraordinary Issue: Coronavirus, Crisis and Communication

Posted April 28, 2020 by CSAA

It does not need to be said that we live in extraordinary times. A world of unprecedented mobility has come to a shuddering stop. The majority of the world’s population is living under some form of quarantine, and work, sustenance and sociability have been almost entirely mediatised. As scholars of media and communication, there are critical developments in play that deserve our attention and our voice.

There has never been a time in which media systems have been able to convey such detailed and universal coverage of an historical event in real time, with the added capacity to keep us all in touch and to give us a voice too. At the same time, the vast social narrative of this pandemic has been visibly characterised by confusion, misinformation, disinformation, charges of conspiracy, cover-ups and multi-vocal denials.

Despite the failure of promises given on their capacity for prediction of precisely this scenario, the world’s tech companies are rapidly developing a host of systems to help us all negotiate life in the time of coronavirus. Some of these, such as tracing apps, are likely to prove controversial, while the products of the online economy are enjoying intense demand from grateful housebound populations.

In amongst this, public health experts have been thrust into the limelight, as they try to guide nations and their leaders, as have economists seeking to secure our futures in the absence of a machine that was never intended to stop. Media experts, too, have their part to play in helping people to make sense of the times that we are living through.

With this in mind, Media International Australia would like to invite submissions of essays, commentaries and articles for an extraordinary issue of MIA that discusses the global, national, local and intensely personal aspects of media and communication in the time of the coronavirus. We welcome these contributions from colleagues across all places and disciplines.

We invite submissions in two categories:

1) Essays and commentaries, up to 2,000 words, on current developments and issues related to the pandemic and communication.

2) Detailed articles, of 6,000 to 8,000 words, addressing aspects of media and communications in key areas, such as: health communication, social media, journalism and public discourse, commerce, politics, culture and logistics.

We intend to publish a selection of submissions received before the end of 2020, and to meet the urgency of the moment, we therefore invite submissions by 14th June 2020.

We understand that this tight turnaround means that contributors will be likely be sharing their evolving thoughts and experiences, without time in many cases to prepare detailed empirical papers. Nonetheless, we feel that our obligation as scholars, and as a journal, is to come together in conversation and to make sense of the multi-faceted role of media and communication in this extraordinary moment.

Authors can submit directly to MIA at: https://journals.sagepub.com/author-instructions/MIA

Please indicate your submission is intended for the special issue.

For enquiries, please contact: Adrian Athique (a.athique@uq.edu.au) and Craig Hight (craig.hight@newcastle.edu.au). The extraordinary issue will be edited by the board of MIA.

‘Australia a Space-faring Nation: Imaginaries and Practices of Space Future’ Indigenous PhD Scholarship

Posted April 23, 2020 by CSAA

Institute for Culture and Society
Western Sydney University

Scholarship code: PS2020_033

About the Project

The Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) is a research institute within Western Sydney University, that champions collaborative engaged research in the humanities and social sciences as the largest dedicated research concentration of its kind in Australia. We are now offering a research scholarship to highly motivated Indigenous PhD candidates to work in an innovative project looking at the social and technological imaginaries of outer space, in Australia and internationally.

The project is funded through the Australian Research Council and investigates the challenges, opportunities and implications of outer space as a site of economic, political, environmental and cultural interest. Combining ethnography, science and technology studies, and creative practice, the project analyses how a range of imaginaries of outer space are produced through a series of case studies including: the development of Australia’s National Space Agency; the role of new venture capital firms; scientific research on alien life in terrestrial analogue sites; and Indigenous imaginaries of outer space.

The project will be based at ICS with the opportunity to work with a number of experienced supervisors in both the Institute and the School of Humanities and Communication Arts.

What does the Scholarship provide?

Domestic candidates will receive a tax-free stipend of $50,000(AUD) per annum for up to 3 years to support living costs, supported by the Research Training Program (RTP) Fee Offset.

Up to $7,000(AUD) support for training, conference attendance, fieldwork and additional research costs as approved by the Institute.

International applicants are not eligible to apply for this scholarship.

How to Apply

For details on how to apply, and for more information including the eligibility criteria, please visit:https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/schools/grs/scholarships/current_scholarships/current_scholarships/ics_australia_a_space-faring_nation_imaginaries_and_practices_of_space_futures_yarramundi?fbclid=IwAR0wMWzrMrmbNR-Bjic6BGHpe6szbCldm7Ht_Ovo6uxF3ESVz3iuCn9buKU

Please contact the Graduate Research School via email at grs.scholarships@westernsydney.edu.au for more information.

Applications close 31 May 2020, at 11:59pm Australian Eastern Daylight Time (AEDT).

Small grants for CSAA members impacted by COVID-19

Posted April 23, 2020 by CSAA

The CSAA recognises that many of its members have been severely impacted, financially and professionally, by COVID 19, and by the resultant disruptions to the sector. In order to support the valuable work of its membership, the CSAA is launching a special round of small grants to assist members continue their research.

Five small grants, of up to $1000 each, will be awarded to current members of the CSAA in need of additional financial support at this time.

This scheme is designed for those who are experiencing loss of work or other hardship as a result of the current pandemic. Preference will be given to those in precarious positions and to those working on projects with impacted groups and/or with community Elders.

To apply, please provide a document with:

your name and location as well as institutional/organisational affiliation if relevant
a 200 word summary of your project
an account of loss of work or hardship caused by COVID-19
an explanation of how you will use the funds

Applications are due Friday May 8, and should be sent to csaageneral@gmail.com, with the subject heading: CSAA Special Round Small Research Grants. Successful applicants will be notified by May 22.

Applications are restricted to current CSAA members. Recipients will be required to provide a short 500-word blog piece summarising the project or any aspect of the project they used the grant for, to be published on the CSAA website.