Events

In this paper we use the five yearly census of occupations and industries to develop a comparative historical perspective on Australian journalism stretching from 1961 to 2016. Connecting patterns of journalism employment with wider histories of media transformation of which our latest iteration, online media form a part, we show how the open internet era (2001-2011) was substantially in continuity with the longue durée of journalism and media development that precedes it while the platform media era (2011-2016) marks a significant departure from these historical patterns. Presenters: Tom O’Regan and Catherine Young.
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This paper draws upon an empirical project into television consumption during a period (2015-17) when the arrival of Netflix transformed the television market in Australia. The results of that project have served as a provocation to the argument that television studies needs to focus in a more considered and apposite way on how consumption is now configured in a context where streaming has become a major constituent of the experience of television. This, the paper argues, may require not only a shift in focus, but also in method and approach. Presenter: Graeme Turner.

Online communities are a topic of increasing academic and practitioner interest. Yet, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of building a firm-hosted online community. Our in-depth single-case study of how the world’s largest miniature model railway exhibition established a vital firm-hosted online community addresses this gap. We identify a process consisting of three key practices – luring, documenting, and moderating – that explains the inherent challenge of building a firm-hosted online community: how to attract and how to keep people engaged with the online community. Presenter: Leona Achtenhagen.

This Roundtable with Professor Leona Achtenhagen will allow those interested in entrepreneurship, the central role it plays in media development, and in educating our students for entrepreneurship to intersect with one of Europe’s leading Professors of Entrepreneurship and Business Development. Using Prof Achtenhagen’s research and that of the Centre she leads, on digital entrepreneurship and her own experience of teaching entrepreneurship to business and journalism students we will explore with her some of the practical steps we can take to encourage an entrepreneurial mindset and ultimately media entrepreneurship, scope out some of the difficulties we might encounter in education for entrepreneurship and harness the intercultural opportunities that a mixed student cohort provides.

Participants: Katalin Trencsényi, Bernadette Cochrane, Stephen Carleton, and Kathryn Kelly

This conversation examines the changing shape of actors and announcers employment and of the live performance and related media industries within which they work. Our starting point for discussion will be historical and contemporary census data on acting and announcing and the live performance and other industries that support these starting from 1933. Our conversation will range over the historical trajectory of actors and announcers since then including their employment within theatre and other live performance spaces and other media industries right up to and including the impact of platforms and platformisation most recently. Presenters: Tom O’Regan and Chris Hay.

This public lecture by internationally renowned dramaturg and researcher Katalin Trencsényi will examine this on two levels: micro-dramaturgy (the level of individual performance-making), and macro-dramaturgy (institutional processes).

Talk by Paris-based curator, editor and writer Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, co-presented with the University of Queensland's School of Languages & Cultures and School of Communication & Arts.

David Lyon presents key arguments from his most recent book The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a way of life. In this book he examines how surveillance is not only something ‘done to us’ – it is something we do in everyday life. He focuses on our varied, mundane experiences of surveillance, insisting that it is time to stop using Orwellian metaphors and find ones suited to twenty-first-century surveillance. Lyon argues that the culture of surveillance may help to domesticate and naturalise surveillance of unwelcome kinds, and considers which kinds of surveillance might be fostered for the common good and human flourishing.

One-Day Symposium

This one day symposium looks across a range of disciplines to consider the coming together of the body with digital devices and media platforms. In this formulation, the body is tracked, networked, coded, monitored and represented on a range of digital media platforms. This involves a making available of the body to the algorithmic and participatory logics of digital media platforms and an entangling of its experiences with these architectures. The networked body is explored as fundamental to understandings of both the body and the digital economy. Presenters: Elizabeth Stephens, Gavin J.D. Smith, Lisa Bode, Shanti Sumartojo, and Sarah Pink.
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New Directors, New Plays, New Work
Three nights of new theatre