Dr Alex Bevan

Originally from the States, I've been at UQ as a researcher and teacher since 2017 and I've been teaching in classrooms since 2006. I teach Multimedia in year one and Digital Project in year three, both of which centre on embedding critical perspectives on contemporary and old media into creative and collaborative design processes. My research has always focused on the relationship among gender, technological change and space. How do new technologies inform the design and representation of space? How are media portrayals of women often used as a vehicle for addressing technological change and transformations in lived space? My methodological approaches combine textual analysis (looking at media content) with more industry-facing, hands-on approaches to answering these questions. For example, I draw on industry interviews, industry conversations about designing space, and analyses of lived spaces.

My first book The Aesthetics of TV Nostalgia (Bloomsbury, 2019) is an industry ethnography of the people designing sets and costumes for nostalgic US television programmes. I address how questions around gender play out on television alongside larger concerns around historical progress and regress that are attached to technological change. You can find my other publications in the areas of television representations of gender, the female body in narratives around nationhood, online archives and how they relate to gender, fashion history, and creative work in television history in Adaptation, Television & New Media, Feminist Media Studies, Cinema Journal, Continuum, Surveillance & Society and Convergence.

The current project turns to representations of gender violence in popular media and how these screen representations and digital cultures offer repeated patterns in the ways women, technology and space are presented.