Research Higher Degree Presentations

On Friday, 6th May there will be a special 90 minute seminar which will focus on the research of three postgraduate students.

Each student will give a 20 minute presentation followed by 10 minutes for questions.

1. Resistance as Curatorial Model: Aratjara and the Reframing of Australian Indigenous Art

 During 1993-94, the exhibition Aratjara: Art of the First Australians, toured in three European cities.  The political context in which it was conceived, as well as its deliberate ‘white cube’ curatorial aesthetic, were antithetical to the detached, didactic model of ethnographic displays of Indigenous art that prevailed in Europe at the time. Given this, the paper considers the curatorial methods employed in Aratjara as a statement of resistance to conventional notions of contemporary art during a period of dramatic revisionism.

• Tasha Finn is a PhD candidate in Art History researching international curatorial responses to Australian Indigenous art.

2. Machine Gun Dreams: Documentary Photography as Epistolic Dialogue

My adult relationship with my father is difficult for me. It is not abusive, violent or exploitative, though differences between us have contributed to an expanding trajectory of disconnection. This study examines the use, and limits, of a contemporary documentary photographic practice to address and challenge fissures in the relationship. Drawing on notions of transgenerational trauma and ethical philosophy the PhD project is nearing completion though the relationship and its difficulties continue.

• Isaac Brown is completing a photographic practice led PhD and is a sessional lecturer at Griffith University.

3. A New Day for Hulk Hogan: Performing Communicative Capitalism and the Rhetoric of Racial Diversity in the Postmillennial Media Marketplace

If World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) were ever to commission a Mount Wrestlemore to honour its suspiciously muscular men, Hulk Hogan's face would ordinarily be the most prominent one on this putative monument. Hogan's July 2015 firing and blacklisting from WWE, due to his racially-charged comments on a 2007 sex tape shot with his best friend's wife, was thus a highly-newsworthy event.

This presentation considers the Hogan firing-whitewash in order to examine how WWE is fulfilling, as part of a norms-influenced corporate social responsibility ethos, a commitment to diversity in a postmillennial America where racial issues remain a hot button and a structuring scar even in the country’s media culture. This examination of WWE’s postmillennial racial politics combines research on corporate social responsibility with the new media scholar Jodi Dean’s work on the (il)logic of communicative capitalism. It locates WWE’s actions with Hogan as a response in line with a domestic media marketplace where the rhetoric of racial diversity is fetishized; this especially in communicative capitalism’s plethora of fractious public spaces which new media channels afford their user-audiences. WWE's handling of the Hogan affair is seen as a strategy through which corporate social responsibility is necessarily spectacularly performed in the public spaces of communicative capitalism.

•  Wilson Koh's PhD thesis deals with how professional wrestling is adapting successfully to a post-broadcast media environment. His most recent publication, with Aaron Choo in Revisioning Terrorism: A Humanistic Perspective, deals with hyperbolic representations of terrorism -- "blockbuster terrorism" -- in popular media texts.