Cultural Studies research projects
Aboriginal femininity and modern identity: Gender and race in the late colonial visual scene
Dr Liz Conor, ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow
This project is the first sustained cultural history of Aboriginal femininity and childhood in Australia from 1788-1967. It draws on diverse forms of visual culture: painting, black and white drawing, mass commodity spectacle, film, photography and material culture to investigate the construction of feminine and childhood Aboriginality in the white imagination. It investigates popular typologies of race, sometimes inter-colonial, that represented Aboriginal women's sexuality as 'black velvet', their domesticity as 'myall, 'detribalised' or 'assimilated', their children as 'piccaninnies', and their maternity as both primordial and abject. It explores the effectiveness of postcolonial ideas of racial mimesis within the particular government policy scenario of assimilation, and it examines the significance of visual identity in white understandings of the racial other.
Australian Fiction 1989 to 2005, and its National and Global Infrastructures (2005-2007)
Evaluating the Australian Popular Fiction Archive: A Definitive Critical History and Bibliography of Early to Late Colonial Genre Writing (2007-2009)
Backward Glances: Chinese Popular Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary
A monograph arising from a three-year ARC Discovery research project (2003-05). Currently under review.
Cultural Research Network: Cultural Literacies, technologies, identities and Histories
Dr Chris Healy, Dr Fran Martin and Dr Audrey Yue
An ARC-funded collaborative research network on cultural, media and communication studies.
Forgetting Aborigines
This research project is concerned with how Indigenous people and things appear in, and disappear from, Australian public culture between 1961 and 2000. A monograph will appear with University of NSW Press in 2008.
The Invasion Complex and Art in the Age of Siege
Assoc Prof Nikos Papastergiadis
Current book projects examining the cultural response to the politics of fear that has been generated after the Tampa crisis and 9/11.
Postmodernism and Australian Art Music
Assoc Prof David Bennett, with Dr Linda Kouvaras, Faculty of Music
This ARC-funded project will be the first systematic investigation of the emergence of postmodernism in Australian art-music, combining the perspectives of Musicology and Cultural Studies. It will demonstrate how resistance to postmodern cultural theory is hampering the critical reception of important new trends in contemporary Australian art-music. Through a series of case studies of major works and their critical reception, and investigations of music-teaching practices, it will develop new methodologies for a synergy between Australian musicology and postmodern cultural studies. Its primary outcome will be a monograph that puts Australian art-music on the map of international debates about postmodernism in music. (2005-7)
Public Screens and the Transformation of Public Space
Assoc Prof Nikos Papastergiadis, with Prof Sean Cubitt and Dr Scott McQuire, Media and Communications
Visit the Spatial Aesththetics website for more information
An ARC-funded critical analysis of the impact of large electronic screens on contemporary forms of social agency in public space (2007-2009). The project proposes an interdisciplinary methodology combining cross-cultural fieldwork with theoretical analysis of artistic interventions into urban culture. These different strands of investigation will culminate in a grounded evaluation of new forms of public engagement. This has strategic relevance to understanding the impact of new media in civic spaces.
Queer Asian Migrations in Australia
Current book project on contemporary queer Asian migration practices in Australia.Reformulating museological narrative using three models of cinematic interactivity
Assoc Prof Nikos Papastergiadis
An ARC-funded analysis of interactive narrative in a museum context in collaboration with the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, University of New South Wales (2004-5)
240 x 360 Degree Digital Video Camera for Interactive Immersive Visualization Research Applications
Assoc Prof Nikos Papastergiadis
An ARC-funded grant for the production of a prototype 360 degree camera, in collaboration with the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research, University of New South Wales (2004)
Sexuality and the Creative City in Singapore
Current book project on the development and impact of creative industry policy on cultural and sexual citizenships in Singapore.
Social Memory and Historical Justice
Dr Chris Healy, with Klaus Neumann, Historical Studies
This comparative project is concerned with how the victimisation of minorities is collectively remembered in a number of national contexts, in collaboration with Klaus Neumann and others.
The Spatial Impact of Digital Technology on Contemporary Art and New Art Institutions
Assoc Prof Nikos Papastergiadis, with Dr Scott McQuire, Media and Communications
An ARC-funded study of the impact of digital technology on the production and display of contemporary art, (2004-6)
More research projects
Further information on the variety of projects in which staff and research fellows are involved is available on their profile pages, which can be accessed from the following pages: