Table of Contents

1

TUHINGA O ROTO Table of Contents HŌTAKA Running Schedule

2

WĀTAKA Schedule of Events

4

NAU MAI Welcome

15

HE MIHI ATU Acknowledgements

16

HE PĀRONGO Conference Information

17

KEI HEA TĀTOU Maps

21

PUKAPUKA Publications

24

Postgraduate Prefix Day

25

Keynote Speakers

28

Patricia Hill Collins

28

Jodi Dean

30

Jeremy Gilbert

31

Wendy Larner

32

Indigeneity and Capitalism Panel

33

Panel Abstracts

35

Panel One

35

Panel Two

47

Panel Three

57

Panel Four

69

Panel Five

84

Panel Six

98

Panel Seven

111

Panel Eight

123

Presenter Contact Details

137

1

HŌTAKA RUNNING SCHEDULE WEDNESDAY DECEMBER 6 8am

PYRAMID / Registration Open

9am

LT200 / Mihi + Welcoming Remarks

9.30am

PYRAMID / Morning Tea

10am

PARALLEL SESSIONS 1

11.40am

PARALLEL SESSIONS 2

12.40pm

PYRAMID / Lunch

1.40pm 3.10pm

LT200 Keynote: Faces as Commons Jodi Dean PYRAMID / Afternoon Tea

3.40pm

PARALLEL SESSIONS 3

6pm

The Hop Garden (13 Pirie Street, Mount Victoria) Opening Reception + Continuum 30th Birthday

THURSDAY DECEMBER 7 8.30am

PYRAMID / Registration Open

9am

LT200 Keynote: Long Memory: Black Feminism as Emancipatory Knowledge Patricia Hill Collins

10.30am

PYRAMID / Coffee

11am

PARALLEL SESSIONS 4

12.30pm

PYRAMID / Lunch CSAA AGM (LT200)

1.30pm

PARALLEL SESSIONS 5

3pm

PYRAMID / Afternoon Tea

3.30pm

PARALLEL SESSIONS 6

6pm

DOMINION BUILDING THEATERETTE (10A02) Keynote Panel: Indigeneity and Capitalism

2

FRIDAY DECEMBER 8 9am

LT200 Keynote: Turning the University Inside Out? Wendy Larner

10.30am

PYRAMID / Morning Tea

11am

PARALLEL SESSIONS 7

12.30pm

PYRAMID / Lunch

1.30pm

PARALLEL SESSIONS 8

3pm

PYRAMID / Afternoon Tea

3.30pm

LT200 Keynote: Hegemony in the Age of Platform Capitalism Jeremy Gilbert

3

WĀTAKA Schedule of Events Wednesday, December 6 9 – 9:30

9:30 - 10

10 - 11:30

Mihi + Opening Remarks [LT200] Coffee PANEL 1 (6 CONCURRENT) Cultures of Entrepreneurship

MANN, Michael

Auckland

Cultivating social entrepreneurs

SEAR, Cynthia

Melbourne

YU, Su-lin

Cheng Kung

[Room 5C19]

DAMJANOV, Katarina & CROUCH, David TAFFEL, Sy

Western Australia Massey

“You’ve got to be in it to win it”: Neoliberal cultures and the serial entrants of promotional competitions. Questioning Neoliberalism in Transnational Context: The Rise of the Neoliberal Female Subject in China Cultures of Capitalism beyond the Globe: Technologies, Mediation and the ExtraPlanetary Commons Hopeful Extinctions? Critical Future Studies and Political Ecologies of Technology

Chair: Nicholas Holm

WALKER, Briohny

Tasmania

Capitalism and Pedagogy

BUCHENAU, Jurgen

UNC Charlotte

BALLANTYNE, Neil

[Room 5C18] Chair: Michael Scott Capitalist Futures and Beyond

Chair: Lukasz Swiatek

THAPLIYAL, Nisha

Open Polytechnic Newcastle

Discursive Politics

GERRITS, Bailey

Queen's

[Room 7C18]

BANKS, Chloe

Otago

MAYDELL, Elena

Massey

GECKLE, Bethany

Otago

[Room 7C09]

Chair: Ian Huffer

Queer Theories of Climate Change and Capitalism: Failure, Forgetting and Cruel Optimism Building a Curriculum in Capitalism Studies in the Liberal Arts Unbundling the academy: Managerialism, educational technology and academic labour Contesting capitalist education: A critical analysis of two activist documentary films from India and the USA Samson and the gold digger: comparing discourses of class, gender, and race in Canadian press coverage of two recent femicides “Race Hustlers” and “Cop Killers” – Racial rhetoric surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement “Wisdom of the crowd” or “the tyranny of the majority”: Constructing democracy and debating racism in Taranaki Daily News Heteronormativity and the Subcultural Interrelations of Skateboarding and Drag

4

The Politics of Sport Cultures in Local and Global Contexts [Preformed Panel] [Room 7D16] Chair: Holly Thorpe

PUDDLE, Damien

Waikato

The Cultural Politics of the Institutionalization of Parkour in New Zealand

WILLIAMS, Neftalie

Waikato

The African American and Minority Experience in U.S. Skateboarding Culture

WHEATON, Belinda & THORPE, Holly NAKHID, Camille

Waikato AUT

The cultural politics of the contemporary Olympic movement: Agenda 2020 and cultural change? Capitalism and a culturally relevant Caribbean research methodology

HENDERSON, Jennifer

Carleton

Neoliberal Gothic and Settler Social Imaginaries

CHERRY-SMITH, Ben

Griffith

Protecting elite ontological security: A new perspective on the development of the White Australia policy

MASSINO, Jill

UNC Charlotte

#REZIST: Popular Resistance to Late Capitalism in Romania

XIAO, Jian

Loughborough

Artistic resistance to urban transformation in China

KHANH, Nguyen

Massey

Media policy, communist power and surveillance culture in Vietnam

JOYCE, Zita

Canterbury

Listening from New Zealand: Secret Station - Secret Power

“Post-Truth”

KING, Barry

AUT

Trump, Post Truth and the triumph of Market Populism

[Room 7C09]

BREVINI, Benedetta

Sydney

When neo liberal ideology is not enough: Post-Truth Politics and Australian mining debates

Chair: Kevin Veale Global Media

CHEN, Xiaochun

[Room 7C18]

THOMAS, Pooja

Southwest (China) MICA

The format transformation of the TV industry: an operation way of capital discourse Global urban citizenship in regional cinema from Kerala, India.

Chair: Ian Huffer Finding a Place to be

CHESHER, Chris

Sydney

Commodifying home: real estate advertising and the production of space

Colonial Legacies [Room ESS] Chair: Holly Randell-Moon

11:40 – 12:40

PANEL 2 (6 CONCURRENT) Modes of Resistance [Room 5C18] Chair: Massimiliana Urbano Surveillance [Room 5C19] Chair: Holly Randell-Moon

5

[Room 7D16]

HICKEY, Andrew

Southern Queensland

Finding Comfort: Comfort as a Condition of Late Capitalist Lifestyle

SHEORAN APPLETON, Nayantara

Victoria University of Wellington Massey

Tracing the medical image: Of methods between cultural studies and visual anthropology

Victoria University of Wellington Southern Queensland Massey

Economy, culture and decolonisation: The enactment of diverse and solidarity economies in Alto Bio-Bio, Chile.

Waikato

“It’s just like, the best feeling ever”: Women Sex Worker's Affective Experiences of Sport and Physical Activity in Aotearoa Investigating the modern Yoga lifestyle through feminist ethnography

Chair: Pansy Duncan Communicating Good Health [Room ESS] 12:40-1:40

Chair: Sy Taffel Lunch

DICKSON, Andrew

1:40-3:10

Jodi Dean: Faces as Commons [LT200] Chair: Pansy Duncan

3:10-3:40

Coffee

3:40-5:10

PANEL 3 (6 CONCURRENT) Making Markets [Room 5C18] Chair: Bailey Gerrits

Towards New Understandings of Women’s Sport and Physical Cultural Experiences [Preformed Panel] [Room 5C19] Chair: Holly Thorpe Neoliberal Discourse

PALOMINOSCHALSCHA, Marcela WALLIS, Rachael PRINCE, Russell, MOUAT, Michael J & ROCHE, Michael O’LEARY, Grace JEFFREY, Alison

Waikato

AHMAD, Nida

Waikato

WHEATON, Belinda & OLIVE, Rebecca PHELAN, Sean

Waikato

Healthy Food (the Pervert’s) Guide: Capitalising on the Culture(s) of Health

Banking on Banjo: business, bias and belonging in rural social imaginaries In Vitro Meat and Cow Free Milk: On Making Markets for Synthetic Animal Food Products

Understanding how Muslim sportswomen are negotiating sporting cultural identities on social media Interrogating surfing’s cultures of consumption: Stories of ‘local’ identity and belonging in Aotearoa/New Zealand What’s in a name? On the use of the concept of neoliberalism

Massey

6

VALDOVINOS, Jorge

Sydney

Transparency as Ideology

MYLONAS, Yiannis

Higher School of Economics (Moscow)

The “Greferendum” and the Eurozone crisis in the Danish daily press

Constructing Class

STRATTON, Jon

South Australia

[Room 7C18]

HOUSEL, Teresa

Massey

Chair Katrina Jaworski

BROMHALL, Richard

Entrepreneurship: A primer

CHUA, Colin

[Room 7D16]

SCOTT, Michael

Nottingham Trent New South Wales Flinders

Pizza and Housos: Neoliberalism, the Discursive Construction of the Underclass, and its Representation “If We Had Used Our Heads, We Would Be Set”: Intersections of Identities with First-in-the-Family Status and Growing Up in Working-Class America Undoing the Literary Prize: Neoliberalism and Social Class

FREDRIKSSON, Martin

Linkoping

The author, the entrepreneur and the proprietor

Political Economy of Schooling

CARDEN, Clarissa

Griffith

[Room ESS]

SALTER, Leon

Massey

“Five per cent anti-bullying and 95 per cent gender propaganda”: Representations of Safe Schools in a Queensland newspaper Articulating the holistic, disrupting neoliberalization

THAPLIYAL, Nisha

Newcastle

[Room 7C09] Chair: Sy Taffel

Chair: Anna-Maria Murtola

Chair: Lukasz Swiatek

Innovation, entrepreneurship, and the spirit of digital capitalism From entrepreneurial to assembleur subjectivities

“Swachh Bharat, Swachh Vidyalaya” (Clean India, Clean Schools): Schooling, sanitation and the cultural politics of neoliberalism of Narendra Modi

HOP GARDEN

Continuum Party

Thursday, December 7 9 – 10:30

Patricia Hill Collins: Long Memory: Black Feminism as Emancipatory Knowledge [LT200] Chair: Kevin Veale

10:30 – 11

Coffee

11 – 12:30

PANEL 4 (8 CONCURRENT) Inventing and Imagining Economies

PRINCE, Russell

Massey

Made to measure: inventing the New Zealand economy

SIGANPORIA, Harmony

MICA

Constructing ‘national culture’ around imagined economies: India and the curious case of Patanjali

7

[Room 5C18]

Victoria University of Wellington Yangzhou

Making up the Numbers? A critical communicative perspective on financial accumulation and crisis in the wake of the credit crunch.

Victoria University of Wellington

The flipside of the divide: mediatisation, attention economics, and the privilege to disconnect

JURGENS, Tim

Massey

“Controversial” Commentary, Video Monetization, and the coming (or ongoing) YouTube ‘AdPocalypse’:

HICKEY, Andrew

Southern Queensland

CASSIDY, Elija & CHEN, Xu LEONG, Susan

QUT

YU, Haiqing

New South Wales

Theorising Capitalism and Culture

GODDARD, Michael

Westminster

[Room 7C18]

SURIN, Kenneth

Duke

Culture, A Reactionary Concept? Capitalistic Culture, Expressive Practices and Cultural Techniques Marx and limits: the discourses of race, cultural, and national identity

NOWAK, Raphael

Griffith

'The relevance of ‘genre’ for (cultural) sociology'

SHUMWAY, David

Carnegie Mellon

It's [Not] a Wonderful Life: What Capra's Film Reveals about Capitalism Today

LYU, Yafei

Canterbury

Chinese Elements in Hollywood Films

BORTOLOTTO, Celina

Massey

Shameful sins: a Reaction to Capitalist Ethics in No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2006)

HARDIE, Melissa

Sydney

Attachment to the Closet

PIPPARD, Annalise

Sydney

Attachment and Detachment

Chair: Michael Scott Politics Online I [Room 5C19]

THOMPSON, Peter ZHANG, Aifeng & HAOYUN, Yao BEATTIE, Alex

Chair: George Elliott

Special Report Presentation: Cultural Studies Teaching Programs

The Cultural Politics of Internet Public Opinion

[Room 7D16] Social/Digital Media and New Formations of Chinese Diaspora (Part One) [Preformed Panel] [Room 7C09] Chair: Haiqing Yu

Chair: Nicholas Holm Capitalist Fictions [Room Block 10, Pres. D] Chair: TBA Queer Media Attachment [Preformed Panel]

Curtin

8

Blued, Tantan and emergent Digital dating cultures among the Australian Chinese diaspora Productive Frictions: the Malaysian, Singaporean and PRC (People’s Republic of China) Chinese Diasporas in Australia Tongshi on the Move: Mobile Place-Making Practices Among Young Gay Chinese

[Room ESS] Chair: Lee Wallace Capitalist Techno-Affects [Preformed Panel] [Room Block 10, Pres. E] Chair: Elizabeth Stephens 12:30 – 1:30 1:30 - 3

Lunch

VILLAREJO, Amy

Cornell

Attachment and Loss

WALLACE, Lee

Sydney

Reattachment

RICHARDSON, Michael

Drone Capitalism

STEPHENS, Elizabeth

New South Wales Queensland

SELLBERG, Karin

Queensland

“It’s Alive!”: Semi-Living Machines and Other Experiments in Post-Industrial Biology The Techno-Affect of Prognosis

CSAA AGM [LT200]

PANEL 5 (7 CONCURRENT) Biopolitics, Biopower and Media (Part One) [Preformed Panel]

PEARSON, Kyra

The Temporal Dimensions of Capitalism’s Complicity with the Carceral State

JAWORSKI, Katrina

Loyola Marymount South Australia

[Room 5C18] Chair: Allen Meek

RANDELL-MOON, Holly

Otago

Epistemic flux and sovereign regimes of Truth

Islam and Capitalism

SOLTANI, Anoosh

Waikato

[Room 5C19]

HUSSEIN, Shakira

Melbourne

Everyday performativity and interpellation of Muslim migrant women as skilled workers within Hamilton’s healthcare workspaces Consumer power, Islamophobia and anti-racism

Chair: Lewis Rarm

SULAIMAN, Mohammed

South Australia

The Muslim Ban and the Place of Islam in a Capitalist World-System

Gendering Capitalism

YLÖSTALO, Hanna

Tampere

[Room 7C09]

TAYLOR, Jess

Edith Cowan

A battle about gender equality: affect, expertise and resistance in the strategic state Capitalism and Womanism in Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures

Chair: Kendra Marston

TAYLOR, Anthea

Sydney

Data Cultures

MORGAN, Benjamin

RMIT

[Room 7C18]

WILSON-BARNAO, Caroline & COLLIE, Natalie

Queensland

9

100 days of butchering: (Re)presenting the Rwandan Genocide 20 years on

Celebrity, Misogyny and Nation: Germaine Greer, The Death of the “Crocodile Hunter,” and Hate Speech Cultures of data and platforms: metrics and meaning in the Australian music industries Intimate listening: probing users from the inside out

Chair: Kevin Veale

PAYNE, Robert

Environments and Environmentalism

DRUICK, Zoe

American University of Paris Simon Fraser

VONK, Lisa

Massey

Chair: Sy Taffel You better work: Reality TV, the self, and neoliberal labour

BRADY, Anita

Caitlyn Jenner, Reality Television and Neo-Liberal Projects of Self

[Room ESS]

HALL, James

Victoria University of Wellington Edith Cowan

McALISTER, Jodi

Tasmania

Creative Economies

LUCKMAN, Susan

South Australia

[Room Block 10, Pres. D]

KUEHN, Kathleen NEILSON, Tai

Victoria University of Wellington Macquarie

#BudgetBachie and #DirtyStreetPie: Consuming Romance in The Bachelor/ette Australia “The devil is in the level”: Social inclusion, identity and power in Australia’s Cultural and Creative Industries Branding the Brewster: Negotiating Authenticity and Gender in the Era of Craft Capitalism

Capitalist Temporalities

GLITSOS, Laura

Curtin

[Room 5C18]

WHELAN, Andrew

Wollongong

Chair: Nicholas Holm

HOPE, Wayne

AUT

Media Activism

DICKINSON, Kay

Concordia

[Room 5C19]

PATRICK, Liz

Massey

JEPPESEN, Sandra

Lakehead

[Room Block 10, Pres. D]

Chair: Chloe Banks

Chair: Sarah Elsie Baker

3 – 3:30

Coffee

3:30 - 5

PANEL 6 (7 CONCURRENT)

Chair: Pansy Duncan

Lossy Media: Queer Encounters With Infrastructure Fly-over Environmentalism: The Political Limits of Current Spectacles of Environmental Disaster Paying Attention to Human Waste: Circular Economies in an Information Age

The Social Contract, Neo-Liberalism and Survivor

Putting Unions Back in Digital Labour

Decolonising capitalist time: Digital culture, memes and taking back time in the corporate workspace 'Ask for more time’: documentary demands and normative temporality in ‘robodebt' Time, global capitalism and the Anthropocene: an ideology critique The Labour of Revolutionary Video Collectives: Defying and Complying with the Cultures of Capitalism Brands as activists: change drivers or noisy distraction? Material and Immaterial Resource Mobilization: Intersectional strategies in the political economy of grassroots autonomous media.

10

Affective Labour

McCANN, Hannah

Melbourne

[Room 7C09]

CAMERON, Alexia

RMIT

Chair: Michael Scott

BROPHY, Enda & ALARCON-MEDINA, Rafael WEST, Caroline

Simon Fraser

Informational Returnees: Cultures of Migration, Deportation, and Class Among the Transnational Call Centre Workforce in Mexico

George Mason

The Lean In Collection: Women, Work, and the Will to Represent

CARUSI, Rahna

Massey

What Does Capitalism Sound Like?: A Literary Studies Approach

FALEATUA, Rachel

Sydney

Insta Brand Me: young women’s voices on ‘authentic’ and ‘wrong’ selfies

Vectors of Capitalism

SWIATEK, Luk

Massey

[Room Block 10, Pres. D]

WATSON, Janell

Virginia Tech

‘Capital Creating Cultures of Peace? A Critical Analysis of Nobel Peace Laureates and their Organisations’ Activist Efforts’ Invasive Cultures

ALLON, Fiona

Sydney

SALUM, Khairat & STURGIS, Meshell RARM, Lewis

Washington

Vampires, Zombies, Monsters and Ghosts? Cultures of financial capitalism, or what would a cultural studies of finance look like? My Black History: Is it in My DNA?

AUT

Excesses of Conduct: Cultural Biopolitics in IS Media

MEEK, Allen

Massey

Traumatic transmission: the biopolitics of attention and immunity

JENSEN, Michael

Canberra

PRATER, Tzarina

Bentley

Chinese Language Media in Australia: Diaspora Media as a form of Active Measures “We mek do”: Race, Gender, Nation, and Digital Platform as Archive

Exclusion and Inclusion of Women [Room 7C18] Chair: Ian Huffer

Chair: Kevin Veale Biopolitics, Biopower and Media (Part Two) [Preformed Panel] [ROOM ESS]

“Doctors of Hair…Entertainers and Counsellors”: Examining Aesthetic and Affective Labour in Hair and Beauty Salons Blueprints of Affect: Workers as ‘Users’ in the New Work Experience

Chair: Holly Randell-Moon Social/Digital Media and New Formations of Chinese Diaspora (Part Two) [Preformed Panel] [Room Block 10, Pres. E] Chair: Michael Jensen EVENING

Indigenous Capitalism Panel – 6pm. [10A02]

Friday, December 8 9 – 10:30

Wendy Larner: Turning the University Inside Out? [LT200] Chair: Ian Huffer

11

10:30 – 11

Coffee

11 – 12:30

PANEL 7 (7 CONCURRENT) / ARC Info Session Australian Research Council Information Session

Joanne Tompkins

Canberra

Information session on ARC Centres of Excellence bids in the Humanities, and general ARC grants

Capital Inequalities

SWIATEK, Luk

Massey

[Room 5C18]

BEAUSOLEIL, Emily

Massey

Chair: Nicholas Holm

REDDEN, Guy

Sydney

Crossing Divides through Podcasting? New Opportunities for Aural Connections, Old Limitations from Capitalist Inequalities’ Shaping Sounding Chambers: How Wealth Inoculates Against Confrontation and What This Means for Social Justice Struggles Neoliberal Ideology? Piketty, Cultural Studies and the Challenge of Inequality

Affective Politics

URBANO, Massimiliana

Otago

Affective Technologies and Grassroots Activism in Contemporary Italy

[Room 5C19]

BOND, Sophie

Otago

Cultures of closure: the making and unmaking of political subjectivities

MEAD, Amy

Flinders

Jill Meagher’s death as spectre/spectacle: public grief and private haunting

Global Flows

HOAD, Catherine

Macquarie

[Room 7C09]

STRONGMAN, Roberto

Chair: Kelly McWilliam

RARM, Lewis

California, Santa Barbara AUT

‘Dark Parts’ and ‘Unexpected Corners’: Tracing the colonialist lexicon of ‘Global Metal’. Creolizing Capitalism in Black Atlantic Religions

Postcolonial Discourse and Governance

SLATER, Lisa

Wollongong

[Room 7C18]

KRAMER, Jill

Macquarie

SMITH, Jo & HUTCHINGS, Jessica

Victoria University of Wellington

A Cultural Politics of Māori Food TV

TRELEASE, Rebecca

AUT

Selling high-art in the low-art format of America’s Next Top Model

MUNRO-COOK, Georgia GIBSON, Mark

Sydney

Sporting Cultures/Capital Cultures: Women’s Basketball and the Price of Commercial Failure The Persistence of ‘the Fringe’ – ‘Post-anti-romanticism’ and Cultural Policy

[Room ESS]

Chair: Pansy Duncan

Chair: Holly Randell-Moon Consuming Authenticity and Popularity [Room: Block 10, Pres. D]

Monash

12

The Strategic Apparatus of Terrorism: Re-thinking contemporary articulations of terror through Foucault The Anti-festival: KALACC, vital politics and the artful business of making Kardiya hear and feel differently Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory?

Chair: Jodi McAlister Music + Activism

LUSTY, Natalya

Sydney

[Room: Block 10, Pres. E]

VILLEGAS, Linda Daniela ALLMARK, Panizza

Sydney Edith Cowan

Dangerous Women: Post feminism, Pop Music, Neoliberalism and international concert tours 2007-2017

YLÖSTALO, Hanna & ADKINS, Lisa BAKER, Sarah

Tampere

Experimenting with Wellbeing: UBI, Immaterial Labour and the Production of Uncertainty Post-work futures and full automation: towards a feminist design methodology

Chair: Ian Huffer

12:30 – 1:30

Lunch

1:30 - 3

PANEL 8 (7 CONCURRENT) After Capitalism [Room 5C18] Chair: Kay Dickinson

From Pussy Riot to the Pussyhat Project: The Resurgence of Radical Feminist Activism Feminist Mexican Hip-Hop: constructing alternative economic sorority networks

Media Design School Tasmania

Creative Labour

WALKER, Briohny & CARLSON, Anna RUBIN, Michel

[Room 5C19]

HENRY, Claire

Massey

Free Universities and Radical Reading Groups: Community self-education as anticapitalist culture creation Ulrich Seidl’s Cinema of Cruelty: nonprofessional performance, labour and exploitation Straying and Slowing with Kelly Reichardt

O'GRADY, Pat

Macquarie

The Art of Creativity: Pop Music Production Process, Technology and Legitimacy

THOMPSON, Jay Daniel

Melbourne

COLE, Rachel

Sydney

Haunting sex: Spectres of commodity capitalism in anti-“media sexualisation of childhood’” discourses Australian Media Classification: Modern predicaments of governance

AGGIO, Amanda

Massey

Child Digital Labor: an investigation into experiences of young children within Advertising Platform

LUCKMAN, Susan

South Australia

‘Make Do and Mend’ Today: Craft as object, action and ethics

VINCENT, Dinah

Massey

Chair: TBA

EDDISON-COGAN, Karma

Sydney

Domestic dressmaking in mid-twentieth century New Zealand: stitching up a modern identity On the Sidewalk: Spatial Practices and the Garage Sale

Embodied Capitalism

MURTOLA, Anna-Maria

AUT

Selling the body or working for capital?

MATTHEWS, Nicole

Macquarie

Marketing hearables: demedicalisation, debility and consumer power

Chair: Kendra Marston Capitalism and Childhood [Room 7C09] Chair: Teresa Housel

Crafting, Mending, Making Do [Room 7C18]

Monash

13

[Room Block 10, Pres. D]

CHEN, Fu-Jen

Disabled Body in Contemporary Global Capitalism

Chair: Pansy Duncan Politics Online II

Sun Yat-Sen (Taiwan)

VEALE, Kevin

Massey

“Is it OK to Punch a Nazi? (Spoiler Alert: Yes) – How the Discursive Construction of “Free Speech” Helps Social Networks Profit From Abuse.

MATTHEWS, Benjamin

Western Sydney

Precarity and Resistance in the “Orgnet”: Exploring the Enspiral Network

DAVIS, Mark

Melbourne

Theorising the anti-public sphere

WHITING, Samuel

RMIT

CARNIEL, Jess

South Queensland RMIT

“That was where I worked, it’s where I did all my socializing, that’s where I played all my shows”: small live music venues and alternative forms of capital Euro Neuro: the cultural and political economies of the Eurovision Song Contest

[Room ESS] Chair: TBA Politics and Power in Popular Music [Room Block 10, Pres. E] Chair: Ian Huffer

ROGERS, Ian

3 – 3:30

Coffee

3:30 - 5

Jeremy Gilbert: Hegemony in the Age of Platform Capitalism [LT200] Chair: Sy Taffel

14

Rock Undead: Rock and roll’s long march back to the margins

NAU MAI Welcome Kia ora Delegates, Welcome to Massey University, Wellington for the annual Cultural Studies of Association of Australasia (CSAA) conference, Cultures of Capitalism. This conference is co-hosted by the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University and the Departments of Sociology, Gender and Social Work and Media, Film and Communication at the University of Otago. The impetus for convening this conference was to think through work of ‘culture’ in relation to capitalism, particularly in light of the disciplinary formation of Cultural Studies around questions of labour, Marxism, ideology, identity, and representation. Cultures of Capitalism will focus on the work that cultures do in constructing, contesting, and constituting capitalism. We seek to critically examine the role of culture in both enabling and articulating new capitalist formations. We undertake this critical project at a time when transformations in labour and its value are also linked to the reification of racialised, sexualised, and classed populations and their management through technologies of capital. How labour is valued contributes to an affective economy of precarity and risk that is differentially distributed throughout society. Indeed this precarity is keenly felt as members of the organising committee are convening this conference while our institutions are undergoing restructures and redundancies based on the decreasing public funding of universities in Aotearoa. At the same time, we acknowledge this conference is funded and executed through classed forms of participation that will result in exclusion. Despite these paradoxes, it is nevertheless hoped that we can discuss and contest some of the dominant cultural rationalities and governmentalities of capitalism and its effects in the next few days. Perhaps we can also initiate cross-activist and transnational alliances. Cultures of Capitalism builds on critical the momentum of previous CSAA conferences. In the first time in a decade since a CSAA conference has been held in Aotearoa, Cultures of Capitalism also offers a showcase for New Zealand cultural studies scholarship and the regional particularities that inform theoretical work down South (or up North depending on where you look at the map). On behalf of the conference committee and our institutional partners, we extend our sincere thanks and welcome for your contribution to our conference. We hope you find the events thought-provoking and activating. Nau mai, haere mai ki Te Whanga-nui-a-Tara. Mauriora, Conference Committee, Pansy Duncan, Nicholas Holm, Ian Huffer, Sy Taffel, Holly Randell-Moon and Kevin Veale.

15

HE MIHI ATU Acknowledgements We acknowledge Māori as tangata whenua, the original people of the land. We are indebted to the generosity of the invited speakers: Helen Moewaka Barnes, Garrick Cooper, Jodi Dean, Patricia Hill Collins, Jeremy Gilbert, Kassie Hartendorp, Jessica Hutchings, and Wendy Larner, for contributing their intellectual labour, time, and commitment to the conference. Their work has inspired political, scholarly, and activist communities to challenge and name capitalist formations and economic injustice and we are honoured to host them at Massey University. We would also like to thank the invited speakers for the Pre-Fix Day: Patricia Hill Collins, Trisia Farrelly, Jeremy Gilbert, Jessica Hutchings, Sarah Jane Parton, Dylan Taylor, and Peter Thompson, for their intellectual generosity and time in furthering postgraduate and early career researcher scholarship. The conference committee is grateful to the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University, the Department of Sociology, Gender & Social Work at the University of Otago, the University of Otago Humanities Research Grant, the Massy University W.H. Oliver Humanities Research Academy, the Massey University College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia for continuing funding and support throughout this conference’s development. Special thanks go to our volunteers: Amie Taua, Amanda Aggio, Lisa Vonk, Tim Jurgens, George Elliot, Penny Hay, Kendra Marston, and Ian Goodwin without whom the friendly and efficient running of the conference’s day-to-day operations could not take place.

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HE PĀRONGO Conference Information VENUE The conference is being held at the Wellington Campus of Massey University. The Wellington Campus is located on a small hill at the South end of Wellington’s central Te Aro suburb. The main entrance to the campus is off Wallace Street (confusingly, Wallace Street is a continuation of Taranaki Street). It can also be accessed off Tasman Street or through the Pukeahu National War Memorial Park. GETTING TO CAMPUS For those conference delegates staying in downtown Wellington, especially in one of the nominated conference hotels, the campus is best reached on foot. Massey University is a 15-minute walk from the CQ hotel. If you are staying elsewhere in Wellington, there are a number of frequent buses that run past the campus. The particular bus will depend on what direction you are arriving from. If you are travelling from the Railway Station, the #10 and #11 buses travel past the campus. For those who are driving, we have arranged a “parking amnesty.” This means that delegates are free to park in any unreserved, unnamed or unnumbered parks on campus, including the King Street carpark. ACCESSIBILITY Wellington is a hilly city, although a comparatively compact one, and the Massey campus is likewise spread across a hilly area. The hotel accommodation for the conference is a comfortable walking distance from the facilities on campus for able-bodied attendees, and we are on major bus-routes from the central city. (Bus numbers 10, 11 and 21 will move from the intersection of Manners St and Courtney Place up Taranaki St onto Wallace St and past the campus, and Wellington buses have provisions for people with impaired mobility.) The campus itself provides accessibility measures wherever possible, but cannot entirely circumvent the hilly nature of the campus that results in many sets of stairs. If you have any accessibility or mobility questions, please ask at the Registration Desk or contact us at: [email protected] so that we can work with you on finding convenient alternatives. REGISTRATION DESK The Registration Desk will be located in The Pyramid which is centrally located on the campus and most easily accessed from the Wallace Street entrance. There should be someone on hand to answer queries at all times during the conference. MORNING TEA, LUNCH & AFTERNOON TEA 17

Your conference registration includes coffee on arrival, morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea, which will be served in the Pyramid. Lunches will be provided by Pomegranate Kitchen: a social enterprise that provides employment opportunities for people from a refugee background. Vegetarian and vegan options will be available as a matter of course. Dairy-free and gluten-free options will be available for those who have requested them. Please leave these options for those who have made special requests. Coffee, Morning and Afternoon Tea are provided by on-site caterer, Tussock. CONFERENCE UPDATES AND TWEETS Conference updates will be signalled at the registration desk and distributed through email should they be required. As the Country School Association of America are no longer using it, we will claim the #CSAA2017 hashtag for those wishing to tweet about the conference. Please be respectful of presentations and consider asking any questions or making any challenges to the people present in the room, rather than your social media followers. PRINTING Should you need to print any documents, please enquire at the Registration Desk. Please ensure that you leave plenty of time to allow for printing. INTERNET ACCESS Details for accessing Massey University’s WiFi network will be available the Registration desk. ATM New Zealand currency can be obtained from the ATM/Bank machine, which is located at the entrance to the Pyramid. PHARMACY The closest pharmacy is located in the Countdown supermarket, which is minutes’ walk south of the campus (away from the city) down Wallace Street (general opening hours are 6am-12midnight). QUIET ROOMS The purpose of our quiet room is to have a safe place for anyone who needs a break, such as nursing mothers, folks with sensory disorders, migraines, or individuals on the autism spectrum. This space is for attendees to take a break from the noise and excitement of the convention. Please keep the following rules to ensure a respectful and relaxing environment for all: • • • •

Please keep conversations to an absolute minimum. Have phone ringers off. If you have to make or take a phone call please take it outside the quiet room. Nursing mothers are welcome, but this is NOT a play space for children. 18

• • •

You may rest your eyes however this room is not intended for long naps. Small snacks are ok but please avoid snacks with strong smells. Scents such as perfume and cologne should be washed off before entering.

NOTE: Attendees not being respectful of others may be asked to leave the quiet room by conference staff. Specific details will be posted at the Registration Desk. MUSLIM PRAYER SPACE Dedicated prayer spaces are available on campus. These are accessible by swipe card. Please ask at Registration should you wish to use these facilities. SECURITY & MEDICAL EMERGENCIES Please ensure that you report any security or medical concerns to Registration and we will do our best to assist. • • •

Campus Security (24 Hours): 0274963681 Police/Ambulance: 111 Campus Facilities Helpdesk (07:30 – 17:00) o [email protected] o Extension 63333 for on-campus phones, or o 04 979333

ANTI-HARASSMENT POLICY CSAA2017 is dedicated to providing a great conference experience for everyone regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, age or religion. For this reason, we do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Conference participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the conference without a refund at the discretion of the conference organizers. Our full anti-harassment policy can be found on the conference website. PLACES TO GRAB A COFFEE/FOOD Tussock cafe is located off the Pyramid and offers a range of food and drinks. For those venturing slightly further afield, upper Cuba Street is a 15-minute walk and contains a wide range of Wellington’s best cafes and bars ranging from the Ekim burger caravan to Wellington coffee institutions like Fidel’s or Midnight Espresso, to fine-dining at Logan Brown. Some other local highlights include: Rasa Ombra Loretta

200 Cuba St 199 Cuba St 181 Cuba St

Malaysian and South Indian food Venetian food Casual cafe with a focus on local and organic 19

Floriditas 161 Cuba St Scopa 141 Cuba St Aunty Mena’s 167 Cuba St

Bit more upmarket with a focus on seasonal food Pizza and pasta A vegetarian institution

Hop Garden Husk Rogue & Vagabond Goldings Tap Room Noble Rot

13 Pirie Street 62 Ghuznee St

Opening night reception Experimental brews from Choice Bros brewery

18 Garrett St 14 Leeds St 91 Aro St 6 Swan Lane

Great place for craft beer in the sun Yet another craft beer bar. It’s Wellington. House bar of the Garage Project brewery A wine bar for a change

These are just the beginning though, please go out and explore our wonderful city! Cuba Street tends to be a more casual, crafty, foodie part of town. If you’re after a few more drinks and a dance (and a fight), then you’ll want to head to Courtney Place. There are some nice spots around the Harbour between Queen’s Wharf and Oriental Bay, while to the South of the campus, the suburb of Newtown offers an eclectic range of options. INSTRUCTIONS TO PRESENTERS Please keep panel presentation to 20 minutes. Please be aware that when you speak for longer than your allotted time you are depriving other panellists of the opportunity to present their work and for discussion and questions following the presentations. Standard sessions are 90 minutes. Papers should be 20 minutes long with 30 minutes for shared question time at the end of the session. Panel chairs will time each session and provide 5 and 2 minute warnings. When you are presenting, please arrive 10 minutes early to ensure that everything is ready to go on time.

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KEI HEA TĀTOU Maps

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Inset map of Southern campus with parallel sessions rooms

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PUKAPUKA Publications There are two publication opportunities for delegates presenting at ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. Special issues of the journals Open Cultural Studies and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies have been secured for the conference. Submissions for the Continuum special issue are open. To submit, interested delegates should send a 250 abstract plus indicative bibliography by December 11 to [email protected]. Acceptances will be sent out on December 22 and full 6,000w articles will be due on January 31, 2018. The CFP for the special issue of Open Cultural Studies, with the theme 'Capitalist Aesthetics,' will be circulated after the conference. Abstracts will be due in early 2018, with a full 6,000w article deadline of mid-2018.

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Cultures of Capitalism

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia 2017 Conference

Early Career Researcher/ Postgraduate Pre-Fix Day 7C18, Massey Campus, Wellington 5 December 2017

Registration

11.00am

Panel Discussion Researching in and out of the Academy

11.30am

Lunch ESS Building

1.00pm

Masterclass With Jeremy Gilbert

2.00pm

Coffee Break

3.15pm

Methodology Workshop With Patricia Hill Collins

3.30pm

Reception Tussock Café & Bar Ground floor, Student Centre Building

5.00pm

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Panel Discussion

Researching in and out of the Academy

This workshop features a panel of speakers who will discuss research pathways outside of the academy as well as the challenges and negotiations of undertaking community and activist focused work within academic institutions. Featured speakers include: Trisia Farrelly (Massey University), Dr Jessica Hutchings (Tiaho Ltd.), Sarah Jane Parton (Massey University College of Creative Arts), Dylan Taylor (Victoria University of Wellington), and Peter Thompson (Victoria University of Wellington).

Professor Jeremy Gilbert

Academics, the Intellectual and Power in the 21st Century

This masterclass with Professor Jeremy Gilbert features a discussion of his current research on hegemony in the 21st century with an examination of the nature of public intellectual work today. Professor Jeremy Gilbert is a Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London. He is a writer, researcher and activist whose work has appeared in various British, European, American and Australian publications. He has been translated into French, Spanish and German. His most recent book is Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (Pluto, 2013) and he has written widely on cultural theory, politics and music. Lots of information, free work, a blog, links to social media and other material can be found at www.jeremygilbert.org

Professor Patricia Hill Collins Methodology workshop

In this workshop, Professor Patricia Hill Collins will discuss why she does the kind of work she does – focusing in particular on the ideas examined in On Intellectual Activism (Temple University Press, 2012). The workshop will also discuss specific issues and methodologies that are related to research on minority groups and cultures. Patricia Hill Collins is a Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Professor Collins is a social theorist whose research and scholarship have examined issues of race, gender, social class, sexuality and/or nation. She is an award-winning author and her work is widely used in undergraduate classrooms in over 200 colleges and universities. In 2008, she became the 100th President of the American Sociological Association, the first African American woman elected to this position in the organization’s 104 year history.

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KEI HEA TĀTOU Location Map for Pre-Fix Day

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Keynote Speakers

Patricia Hill Collins University of Maryland Long Memory: Black Feminism as Emancipatory Knowledge U.S. Black feminism is often viewed as one form of feminism among many. This framing assumes that Black feminism can be evaluated by its proximity to predetermined feminist norms or, alternately, explained by how it fits into a pantheon of multicultural feminisms, e.g., Latina feminism, black British feminism or Maori feminism. My presentation begins in another place. I suggest that the "Black" in Black feminism is not an adjective that can be attached to a preexisting feminism, or positioned as one of many equivalent feminisms. Rather, U.S. Black feminism is one of many political, social, intellectual and cultural projects that emerged in response to the historical organization of racial domination. Intersecting power relations of race, class, gender, sexuality, age and ethnicity all matter theoretically, yet historically, race and racism have been especially salient for Black feminism. In essence, "Black" is not an adjective but a noun. My presentation explores how U.S. Black feminism draws upon the long memory of African American women's political, social, intellectual and cultural responses to an existential threat to Black lives. Whether one got to live or die, and the terms under which one would live one’s life have not been assured. During slavery and its aftermath, anti-Black racism has been one core feature of U.S. society, ensuring different forms of structural captivity. For African Americans responding to these social relations, freedom assumed literal and metaphoric meanings that shaped politics and culture. Moreover, because racial domination in the U.S. has taken gender-specific forms, African American women confronted different existential challenges with life and death than those facing men. In this context, Black feminism reflects varying gender-specific responses by African American women to foster both their own survival as well as that of their loved ones.

Biography: Professor Collins is a social theorist whose research and scholarship have examined issues of race, gender, social class, sexuality and/or nation. Her first book, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge), published in 1990, with a revised tenth year anniversary edition published in 2000, won the Jessie Bernard Award of the American Sociological Association (ASA) for significant scholarship in gender, and the C. Wright Mills Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her second book, Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology, 9th ed. (2016), edited with Margaret Andersen, is widely used in undergraduate classrooms in over 200 colleges and universities. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (Routledge, 2004) received ASA’s 2007 Distinguished Publication Award. Her other books include Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 1998); From 28

Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (Temple University Press 2005); Another Kind of Public Education: Race, Schools, the Media and Democratic Possibilities (Beacon Press, 2009); the Handbook of Race and Ethnic Studies, edited with John Solomos (Sage, 2010); and On Intellectual Activism (Temple University Press, 2012). In 2008, she became the 100th President of the American Sociological Association, the first African American woman elected to this position in the organization’s 104-year history.

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Jodi Dean Hobart and William Smith Colleges Faces As Commons If a central contribution of Marx’s analysis of capitalism was his identification of the ways capitalism produces its own gravediggers, what elements of the present pointing beyond it does communicative capitalism identify? One answer appears in the commoning of faces, a practice that emerges out of the communicative practices of mass social and personal media. To explore this commoning, I develop the idea of “secondary visuality” as a feature of communicative capitalism. Reflecting on the repetition of images and circulation of photos as communicative practices, I present secondary visuality as an effect of communication that blends together speech, writing, and image into something irreducible to its components, something new. With secondary visuality, faces lose their individuating quality and become generic. Faces in common push back against the individualism of contemporary capitalism, suggesting a way that it is producing new possibilities for collectivity. Biography: Jodi Dean is the Donald R. Harter ’39 Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She is the author of twelve books, including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke University Press 2009) Blog Theory (Polity 2010), The Communist Horizon (Verso 2012), and Crowds and Party (Verso 2016).

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Jeremy Gilbert University of East London Hegemony in the Age of Platform Capitalism Although neoliberal ideas had been circulating since the 1930s, actually existing neoliberalism only emerged in the context of the crisis of ‘Fordism’ at the end of the 1960s. Neoliberalism as an actual practice of government and a hegemonic project has been bound up indissolubly with processes such as globalisation, digitisation and financialisation, and above all with the emergence of ‘post-Fordism’. In recent years the post-Fordist model of ‘flexible accumulation’ has been displaced by a new leading model of capitalist accumulation, organised around massive digital platforms which tend towards conditions of monopoly, through their facilitation of the large-scale aggregation of data, populations and markets. Under these conditions, the mechanisms by which passive or active consent for the hegemonic position enjoyed by governing elite is secured are changing rapidly: in particular such elites are no longer able to appeal to their status as competent technocrats, guaranteeing perpetually rising living standards for majority populations, and find it increasingly difficult to neutralise resistance to growing inequality and social degradation. That resistance can take progressive forms, but all too often takes the form of reactionary hostility to a perceived elite culture of cosmopolitanism and social liberalism. As a result the legitimacy of neoliberalism has never been under greater strain following the decade-long failure to resolve the financial crisis of 2008. The elites of Silicon Valley appear increasingly willing to assert their political and cultural independence from the culture and expectations of the traditionally authoritative institutions of finance capital, whilst taking up a new role as global philanthropic technocrats, and their relationship to neoliberalism as a political project remains complex and ambiguous . At the same time various reactionary forces seem able to benefit from the breakdown of authority being suffered by a political class that had historically tied itself to the interests and outlooks of finance. A particular challenge posed to progressive forces under these circumstances is that of defending and extending political positions which value cosmopolitanism, resist racism and extend the democratic demands of feminism, without allying themselves to that decaying political class, which increasingly tries to appeal to liberal feminism as a key source of legitimacy. A further question is how progressive forces can use platform technologies to achieve democratic ends, and what threat might be posed to them by the monopoly control of major platforms in the medium term. Biography: Professor Jeremy Gilbert is a writer, researcher and activist whose work has appeared in various British, continental, American and Australian publications and has been translated into French, Spanish and German. His most recent book is, Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism (Pluto 2013) and he has written widely on cultural theory, politics and music. His 2008 book Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics is available for free legal download at Anticapitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics. Lots of information, free work, a blog, links to social media, and other material can be found at http://www.jeremygilbert.org. Jeremy was a founder organiser of both Signs of the Times and the London Social Forum, a convenor of the Radical Theory Forum at the European Social Forum, Paris in 2003 and London in 2004, and has been involved with many political and cultural projects inside and outside the academy. He has written with varying degrees of regularity for Open Democracy, Comment is Free Soundings and Red Pepper. 31

Wendy Larner University of Victoria, Wellington Turning the University Inside Out? New ways of working are arising from the conjuncture between changes in women’s working lives and their political commitments. Women and feminism are now well and truly inside public institutions and mainstream organisations, even if unequal power relations and the under-representation of women remains, and changes in organisational practice and culture are not always explicitly named as feminism. This talk reflects on the shifts that have occurred in universities as more women have taken up opportunities for tertiary education and moved into academic careers. I will show that women have acted as ‘change agents’ in universities, linking our growing presence to new knowledge practices, the growth of participatory leadership styles, and the mainstreaming of equality and diversity strategies. While recognising the intractability of gendered inequalities, I suggest universities are being reconfigured in this new chapter in the history of women, feminism and gendered labour. Biography: Professor Wendy Larner is Provost at Victoria University of Wellington and President-elect of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. She completed a BSocSci at Waikato (1983), MA (First Class Hons) at Canterbury (1989), and her PhD as a Canadian Commonwealth Scholar at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada (1997). She has held academic positions at the University of Waikato (NZ), University of Auckland (NZ), and University of Bristol (UK). She has also been a Fulbright Fellow at the University of WisconsinMadison (US), Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Queen Mary University, London (UK), and a Guest Professor at the University of Frankfurt (Germany). Her research is in the interdisciplinary fields of globalisation, governance and gender. She has published over 80 refereed articles and book chapters, nine monographs, edited collections and special issues, and delivered over 100 invited lectures/keynote addresses across four continents. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (UK), and a Fellow of the New Zealand Geographical Society.

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Keynote Panel Indigeneity and Capitalism: Negotiating and Challenging Dominant Economies and Ways of Living This keynote panel will discuss some of the dominant ways ‘culture’ has been used to economically govern Indigenous peoples and communities. The economies of settler colonialism have been premised on the expropriation and appropriation of Indigenous lands and resources. At the same time, Indigenous activism has challenged and continues to negate the cultural ideas of capitalism to broaden social and political understandings of what constitutes ‘property’ and ownership and what kinds of lifestyles, knowledge, and forms of work can be valued and protected. In particular, Indigenous based epistemologies that value collective and social responsibility constitute a significant opposition to the market logics of neoliberalism and the citizen as consumer. Panellists in this presentation discuss how, or not, Indigenous communities and ways of knowing and living relate to contemporary and historical forms of capitalism. Panellists include: Professor Helen Moewaka Barnes (Massey University), Garrick Cooper (University of Canterbury), Kassie Hartendorp, and Dr Jessica Hutchings (Tiaho Ltd.). Biographies: Helen Moewaka Barnes (Te Kapotai, Ngapuhi-nui-tonu) is a multidisciplinary social scientist, with expertise in theory development, quantitative and qualitative methods, research design, and project management. She has particular expertise in the fields of Māori health, Māori methods and methodologies, research ethics and tikanga, community engagement and Māori research capacity building. Helen’s research areas currently include wairua, natural environments and health, life-course approaches to health and wellbeing, health promotion, health services research, identity and culture, sexuality, parent and child health, whanau ora, growing Māori and Pacific research capacity and research use, developing methods and methodologies within Māori paradigms and evaluation research. Helen is Chair of the Kahui Tuturu for A Better Start National Science Challenge and co-theme leader, Te Tai Ao, Ngā Pae o te Maramatanga Māori Centre of Research Excellence. Garrick Cooper (Ngāti Karaua (Hauraki) / Te Pirirākau [Tauranga Moana]) is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Māori & Indigenous Studies at the University of Canterbuy. He is interested in practices of 'decoloniality' in Aotearoa. This includes understanding the ways in which coloniality reproduces and sustains itself and maintains the interests of dominant groups in society and how we might subvert those processes. To this end, one part of his research project includes using Māori epistemologies (and the philosophical insights that we can draw from these) to critique dominant narratives about Māori (and perhaps “others”) and create new pathways forward that transcend the binaries of Europeans and natives, Māori and Pakeha, the oppressor and the oppressed. Kassie Hartendorp (Ngāti Raukawa / Pākehā) is an activist based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington. Her work is driven by the aim of connecting, communicating and challenging the injustices of capitalism and colonisation. Most of her adult life has been spent working in the youth sector and within LGBTIQ communities. She has a BA in Gender and Women’s Studies and Media Studies, and is currently studying Ahunga Tikanga – Māori Laws and Philosophy at Te Wānanga o Raukawa. 33

Dr Jessica Hutchings (Ngāi Tahu, Gujarati) has been working at the crossroads of Indigenous knowledge, whānau and environmental wellbeing for the last two decades and has published and presented extensively in these fields. Her broad areas of expertise includes: kaupapa Māori theory and methods, globalisation, Māori food sovereignty, Indigenous development and environmental studies. A member of Te Waka Kai Ora (National Māori Organics Organisation) for many years, Jessica helped lead a kaupapa Māori research project to develop a tikanga-based Māori food standard, Hua Parakore, and is herself a verified Hua Parakore food producer, growing kai and healing the land on her small farm north of Wellington. She has published in peer-reviewed journals such as New Genetics and Society, MAI Journal and He Pukenga Kōrero. Her recent anthology with Dr Jenny Lee-Morgan on kaupapa Māori, Decolonisation in Aotearoa: Education, research and practice won the 2017 non-fiction category at the Māori Book awards. Her first monograph Te Mahi Māra Hua Parakore: A Māori Food Sovereignty Handbook (TeTākupu, 2015) also won the best non-fiction category in the 2016 Māori book awards. The monograph focuses on resilience, whānau wellbeing and the politics of food, and food sovereignty issues with a particular emphasis on the relationships between local and global Indigenous knowledge systems. For further information see: www.jessicahutchings.org.nz

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PANEL ABSTRACTS

PANEL ONE DEC 6, 10-11.30AM PANEL A (ROOM 5C18) Cultures of Entrepreneurship Chair: Michael Scott Michael Mann

University of Auckland Cultivating social entrepreneurs In the post-welfare context of lean public budgets, devolved governance, and cross-sectoral partnerships, social enterprises are playing an increasingly central role in social provisioning. Key to the idea of the social enterprise—namely, an organisation that uses business-like methods to achieve social objectives alongside financial objectives—has been the figure of the empowered ‘social entrepreneur.’ Despite a large amount of critical inquiry into the political-institutional significance and implications of social enterprises, little attention has been given to the cultivation of social entrepreneurs themselves. In response, this paper examines the cultivation of social entrepreneurial subjects. Joining studies of governmentality with recent literature on neoliberal affects, the paper discusses how ‘affective technologies’ and ‘affective spaces’ are an important means through which citizens-turned-social-entrepreneurs are empowered to replace or supplement state-based social provisioning activities. The paper draws on findings from empirical research on social entrepreneurs in New Zealand.

Cynthia Sear

University of Melbourne “You’ve got to be in it to win it”: Neoliberal cultures and the serial entrants of promotional competitions. The effects of neoliberalism, such as labour precarity and inflation, have been a key area of discussion in the social sciences for over two decades. There is a gap in the literature, however, regarding the creative and social ways in which people will limit household expenditure and extend household income. Via auto-ethnography and digital observation, this paper examines the online “community of practice” of ‘Prize Pigs’: Australians who win cash and prizes by entering promotional competitions. As I explore, this community has been lauded in current affairs programs but criticised by the companies that offer such promotions. While appearing to answer the call of neoliberal discourse as regards to entrepreneurship and the creative management of the household budget, this community thwarts the intention of companies which offer promotional competitions, to incite purchase, foster brand loyalty and to build databases for use in future promotions or research. As a precursor to ethnographic fieldwork amongst Prize Pigs, this paper will interrogate existing literature 35

regarding consumption and thrift while contributing to the theorisation of power and sociality in capitalist projects. This paper will further comment on the ambivalent relationship between neoliberal discourse and the lived experience of late-capitalism.

Su-lin Yu

National Cheng Kung University Questioning Neoliberalism in Transnational Context: The Rise of the Neoliberal Female Subject in China This article considers the influence of China’s transition from communism to capitalism on women’s gender identity. Using China as a case study, I will examine if global process of social and cultural change, especially the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, challenges local gender orders. To analyze the effects of this process, this article will explore how Go Lala Go! (2010), a blockbuster that reflects integration of the Chinese urban society in a global consumer culture, contains complex and contradictory messages about young Chinese women’s struggles with hegemonic patriarchal culture as well as global capitalism. Portraying young professional women’s coming-of-age story in a contemporary China, the story juxtaposes the career success of the female protagonist Du Lala with the new economic independence and transnational commercialization of China. On the one hand, it celebrates an active, empowering form of female sexual and financial independence in neo-liberal market terms, suggesting a significant departure from earlier representations of Chinese women. On the other hand, it legitimizes young Chinese women’s agency through neoliberal process of subjectification rather than subvert the dominant patriarchal social order. Therefore, Go Lala Go! aestheticizes both possibilities and limits of neoliberal influences on modern Chinese women as they gain individual freedom and economic advancement within the grand narrative of nation building and a global consumer culture.

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PANEL B (ROOM 5C19) Capitalist Futures and Beyond Chair: Nicholas Holm Katarina Damjanov & David Crouch

University of Western Australia Cultures of Capitalism beyond the Globe: Technologies, Mediation and the Extra-Planetary Commons The momentum of high-tech capitalism has been extending beyond the globe, into a domain conceived as the global commons. Grounded in mediation infrastructure, processes and practices, the technological conquest of outer space is transforming its inhuman expanses into a human domain and domesticating the extra-planetary commons as site of capitalist production and destruction. Our advances in outer space are entwined into the ambits of global media cultures down on earth; aside from the myriad ways in which space and its exploration are popularly imagined, there are also a variety of media platforms and products that use techno-scientific data and creative visualisation to draw the extra-planetary into the quotidian. A range of interactive web content and mobile and desktop applications currently offer experiences of outer space – maps and tours of planets and galaxies, packages that track and detail past, current and future space missions and real time observation of celestial events and phenomena. Situated at the intersections of techno-science, military-industrial complexes and creative industries, they are symptomatic of the ways in which the cultural practices and affects surrounding outer space are drawn into the exploration and exploitation of the extra-planetary commons. This paper considers examples of such media operations in their space age, exploring their material and social effects and highlighting the technologically-driven transformations that underlie the extension of the cultural logics of capitalism into the commons of space.

Sy Taffel

Massey University Hopeful Extinctions? Critical Future Studies and Political Ecologies of Technology Over thirty years since Jean-Francois Lyotard declared the death of metanarratives, we currently find two apparently incompatible discourses that dominate imagined planetary futures. On the one hand, we encounter a metanarrative of technological progress has been fuelled by decades of advances in computational, networked, mobile and pervasive technologies. On the other, we find the apocalyptic discourse of the Anthropocene, whereby human activity is understood to be responsible for precipitating the sixth mass extinction event in Earth’s geological record. This paper explores how the divergent futures of techno-utopianism and ecological catastrophism emerge from contemporary technologies; digital technoculture is a critical component of both the inhuman networks of globalised capitalism and the means by which predictions of the probable and possible futures of complex ecological systems are rendered imaginable. Critically examining the materiality of digital technoculture challenges the immaterialist rhetoric of technological solutionism that permeates both neoliberal and leftist discourses of automation, whilst questioning the ‘we’ that is implicit in the problematic universalisation of Anthropocenic discourse, instead pointing to the deeply entrenched inequalities that perpetuate networked capitalism. 37

Ultimately, the paper asks whether it is possible to move beyond bleak claims that we must simply ’work within our disorientation and distress to negotiate life in human-damaged environments’ (Tsing 2015:131), to assemble the fragile hope that Goode and Godhe (2017) argue is necessary to move beyond capitalist realism. Hope suggests an optimism that sits uncomfortably with the reality of mass extinctions, however, the scale of the ecological crises means that we cannot afford the fatalism associated with losing hope.

Briohny Walker

University of Tasmania Queer Theories of Climate Change and Capitalism: Failure, Forgetting and Cruel Optimism We are living in an era that teams with examples of the failures of capitalism to offer a route into the future. One name given to this era is the Anthropocene; another is the Capitalocene, which works to draw further into view the specific kinds of human behaviours generating the rapid environmental degradation that characterises this era, along with the great inequality in the distribution of benefits and damages masked by the homogenisation of “anthropos”. The great existential threat posed by climate change is evidence of failures on behalf of capitalist cultures, including failures to more fully account for materiality. A rethinking of the potential political richness of these failures is available via queer theory texts from Jack Halberstam and Lauren Berlant. In The Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam discusses the liberatory potentials of failures to meet heteronormative capitalist success markers. Halberstam also engages with the possibilities for change that can be generated via failures to remember by disrupting the temporal logics of thinking of humanity in terms of successive generations. Dealing with similar concepts of the failure of promised futures, Lauren Berlant’s study of Cruel Optimism illuminates the role of affect in perpetuating harmful systems and institutions, such that “your attachment to an object sustains you in life at the same time as that object is actually a threat to your flourishing”. With these texts in hand, I aim to open up the political potential of conceiving of climate change as a massive failure of capitalist culture.

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PANEL C (7C09) Capitalism and Pedagogy Chair: Luk Swiatek Jurgen Buchenau

UNC Charlotte Building a Curriculum in Capitalism Studies in the Liberal Arts In most universities in the United States, systematic engagement with the theory and practice of capitalism occurs primarily in business schools and/or departments of economics. Especially since the so-called "cultural turn," humanities departments have shied away from in-depth analyses of capitalist structures, preferring to focus on social and cultural analysis. As a result, few U.S. students in cultural studies-infused humanities disciplines such as History, Communication Studies, English, International Languages, Philosophy, or Religious Studies are trained in a systematic analysis of capitalism, let alone the quantitative methods necessary to understand the economic theories that underlie both neoliberal capitalism and its critics. However, the Great Recession of 2008 prompted a rethinking within U.S. humanities departments and decisively contributed to what we might call an incipient "quantitative turn" that once again calls upon scholars in both the humanities and social science--and particularly the discipline of History--to embrace quantitative analysis in order to understand that material base of cultural and social interaction. Similarly, the crisis prompted faculty in the humanities and the social sciences to embrace studies in "entrepreneurship," in most cases, efforts to teach graduates in the humanities and social science skills easily transferable to the workplace. These skills might include training in marketing or accounting, among other skills deemed "practical" by university administrators, but they do not include a systematic understanding of capitalist structures and their role in shaping cultures and societies. Yet another (and more blatantly political) initiative has been the privately funded establishment of neoliberal boot camps at several universities, with fancy labels such as the Lyceum Scholars Program at Clemson University in South Carolina. This paper will discuss recent efforts to build "capitalism studies" programs in the United States, including one under development at my own university, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, as well as established programs at the New School of Social Research and Cornell University. Unlike the aforementioned programs, which aim to increase the marketability of humanities graduates by either teaching specific job-related skills or neoliberal indoctrination, programs in Capitalism Studies can harness the broad inquiry found in the humanities to a fundamental examination of the cultural, economic, social, and political dimensions of capitalism, while also increasing the students' ability to use quantitative reasoning as an important tool. Even more importantly, these programs can teach students to think about capitalism independently and critically.

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Neil Ballantyne

Open Polytechnic Unbundling the academy: Managerialism, educational technology and academic labour The marketisation and commodification of tertiary education under neoliberalism is not a new phenomenon but has, in recent years, become more intense. In New Zealand, the corporate managerial culture associated with emergent academic capitalism is especially acute in the polytechnic sector, and accelerated in sites where academic labour is entangled with the technologies, and production processes, of open and distance learning. In this latter context, the lexicon of academic managers valorizes transformational change, flexibility, innovation, learning analytics and unbundling. This discourse depicts the collegial culture of academics, and the academic community itself, as an outdated and elitist obstacle to educational innovation. Yet, behind the narrative tropes of modernisation, student-centred design and digital learning are plans to usher in organisational and technological changes that will fragment academic labour, speed up the educational assembly line and connect the subjectivities of students ever more closely to the needs of capital. Paradoxically, whilst disruptive innovation is fetishized by the managers of publicly funded institutions, their moves to create the conditions for transformational change risk opening the market to powerful, international, for-profit organisations that could sweep them away. None of this is inevitable. Academics, students and other citizens must debate alternatives to academic capitalism that reimagine distance education as a public good, and consider how technologies might foster educational purposes that are open, democratic, critical and cooperative.

Nisha Thapliyal

University of Newcastle “Contesting capitalist education: A critical analysis of two activist documentary films from India and the USA The neoliberal assault on public education in India and the USA has been facilitated by a powerful assemblage of corporate media. Representations of education in news and popular culture media tend to harp on two themes -– a public education system in crisis, and, relatedly, the private or corporate business sector as the only viable savior. This paper makes a critical and comparative analysis of two recent documentary films produced by ongoing, collective, grassroots struggles to defend public education. The 2016 film ‘We Shall Fight, We Shall Win’ was made by the All India Forum for the Right to Education (AIFRTE) while the 2010 film ‘An Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman’ was made by the New York City-based Grassroots Education Movement (GEM). Both documentaries were created with the intention to challenge pro-market discourses of education reform and to expose the ways in which educational privatization exacerbates social inequality and exclusion. A second and related message in both films is concerned with the relationship between public education and participatory democracy. I discuss the ways in which these messages are constructed and communicated as instances of the meaning-making or cultural work that is produced in sites of collective struggle. The comparative analysis reveals similarities in activist communication practices such as the amplification of historically excluded voices but also highlights the contingent nature of collective resistance to the neoliberalisation of education. 40

PANEL D (ROOM 7C18) Discursive Politics Chair: Ian Huffer Bailey Gerrits

Queen’s University Samson and the gold digger: comparing discourses of class, gender, and race in Canadian press coverage of two recent femicides Even though Canada’s current Prime Minister presents the country as a bastion for gender equality, multiculturalism, and progress, gendered, colonial, and racialized oppression are foundational and ongoing issues in Canada and gender-based violence is often a manifestation of an intersection of such oppressions. Recent cases of one type of gendered violence – femicide – offer insight into how media enterprises interweave discourses that support a neoliberal, individualized notions of public safety. A poor white man is on trial for killing three women, all former partners, September 22, 2015 while out on bail in rural Canada. Another man, this time non-white and a neurosurgeon, is on trial for killing his also doctor wife late November 2016 in Canada’s largest urban centre. Both men have documented violent pasts and both cases alit local and national Canadian news coverage, yet the differences in class, respectability, and race are also central to the stories. Comparing the press coverage of these two cases of femicide offer an important opportunity to deeply consider discourses of gender, racialization, ruralness/urbaness, and class. Interweaving textual content and discourse analysis with interviews with the reporters that wrote the stories about the men on trial and the murdered women, this paper offers insight into the often-obscured language of class underpinning the coverage gendered violence and the persistence of victim-blaming, racialization, and individualization of one of Canada’s pressing social problems – gendered violence.

Chloe Banks

University of Otago “Race Hustlers” and “Cop Killers” – Racial rhetoric surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement The Black Lives Matter movement was created from a hashtag used on Twitter in 2012 when George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin. Advocacy and nonviolent protests by Black Lives Matter groups have been framed in news media reporting as riots and the group has been called ‘racist’ and ‘anti-law enforcement’. This framing has led to the counter movements Blue Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. This paper will unpack the racialising rhetoric that has been used to mediate BLM. I argue the effect of the mediation is the delegitimisation of the very real problems concerning racial profiling and racial killings that the Black Lives Matter group seeks to find solutions for. I will examine Black Lives Matter’s own goals and how these are ignored or questioned in the news media by framing such as ‘race-hustlers’. This paper uses Eduardo BonillaSilva’s notion of racial grammar to examine these instances of racist rhetoric in re- presentations of Black Lives Matter movement in news media.

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Elena Maydell

Massey University “Wisdom of the crowd” or “the tyranny of the majority”: Constructing democracy and debating racism in Taranaki Daily News Research on ‘New Racism’ suggests that blatant and covert expressions of racism have been replaced by more covert and subtle manifestations of racial prejudice, some of which are articulated in the name of ‘democracy’. Mainstream media present a space for discussing such notions as ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and similar others, by providing relevant discursive resources and also by offering a forum for expressing public opinion, for example by publishing letters to the editor. This research looks at the constructions of racist attitudes expressed in the regional New Zealand newspaper, Taranaki Daily News, following the debate in relation to the former Mayor of New Plymouth Andrew Judd who attempted to establish a Māori ward on the New Plymouth District Council. The public referendum subsequently quashed his initiative. This study analysed 82 news items published between May 5, 2016, and November 8, 2016, including 29 letters to the editor. The analysis revealed how such concepts as ‘democracy’, ‘majority’, ‘merit’ and ‘equality’ were utilised to resist accusations of racism and reaffirm the cultural politics of neoliberalism as the grounds for Pākehā dominance.

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PANEL E (ROOM 7D16) The Politics of Sport Cultures in Local and Global Contexts Chair: Holly Thorpe Bethany Geckle

University of Otago Balls Out: Masculinity and Heteronormativity in Skateboarding and Drag Skateboarding and drag (female impersonation) are often thought of as subversive countercultures. However, that may not always be an accurate perception. My presentation compares the elite skate teams and companies between the 1970s and 1990s to a population of minority drag queens presented in the seminal documentary Paris is Burning (1990). This comparison reveals that both the skate, and drag, cultures actually existed within the bounds and expectations of a particularly restrictive time in American history. The Cold War and Reagan administration that defined this era returned much of American culture to a mythical 50s. Nostalgia for conservatism generated stricter interpretations of traditional masculinity and heteronormativity. This resulted in a social atmosphere that several groups of young people would come to experience and perceive as suffocating and unjust. These groups became countercultures. Despite identifying and being treated as countercultures, skaters and queens typically reinforced traditional notions of masculinity and heteronormativity. Each did so with different intentions. Skaters attempted to maintain their privilege as predominately white heterosexual males. The queens of Paris Is Burning attempted to gain the status denied to them by virtue of their minority position. While skate and drag are, indeed, countercultural in certain instances, in this case each conformed, or attempted to conform, to mainstream social expectations.

Damien Puddle

University of Waikato The Cultural Politics of the Institutionalization of Parkour in New Zealand Globalization has led to the increased sportization and professionalization of parkour, one of the world’s newest lifestyle sports. This paper investigates the parkour scene in New Zealand, where attempts to develop and support parkour have resulted in the formation of a national governing body (NGB). Parkour NZ, formed in 2010 by local practitioners and the first NGB for parkour to be registered as a charity, is undergoing increased professionalization in both traditional and unique ways. We examine the motivations that inspired its formation, some of the challenges it has negotiated, such as coaching accreditation and funding, as well as how local and global influences have caused Parkour NZ to continually navigate discussions of authenticity and ultimately the evolution of the discipline. Our case study adds to understandings of glocalization and sportization of informal lifestyle sports, and highlights how parkour practitioner values are negotiated within new organizational spaces.

Neftalie Williams

University of Waikato The African American and Minority Experience in U.S. Skateboarding Culture

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The 2020 Tokyo Olympics represents the first-time skateboarders perform before the Olympic rings. As skateboarding continues to spread across the globe, there has been little exploration into the role of minority participants within this global sport. In this paper I draw upon Critical Race Theory to examine the lived experiences of African American and minorities who have played key roles in US skateboarding culture. In particular, I am interested to understand how they have negotiated space within a sport that has for many years been perceived as an activity for young white males, and the contributions minority skaters have made to challenging and expanding such stereotypes. Drawing upon interviews and media analysis, I place their voices at the forefront of an exploration of skateboarding’s potential to support the creation of new identities, and provide minority participants access to a global sporting community. In so doing, this research aims to understand if there is potential power in skateboarding to create new racial politics which might empower communities of colour.

Belinda Wheaton & Holly Thorpe

University of Waikato The cultural politics of the contemporary Olympic movement: Agenda 2020 and cultural change? Sporting culture has long been recognized by cultural studies scholars as a key cultural site where cultures can mediate economic conditions in multiple and heterogeneous ways (Miller, Lawrence, McKay, Rowe, 2001). The Olympics Games (OG) has garnered considerable academic attention as a corporate-driven, global mega event sitting at the centre of the global sportscape (Whannel &Tomlinson, 1984). Yet in contrast to many other sporting and cultural mega-event, the OG are presented and promoted as the prime expression of the philosophy of Olympism, and are organised within a strict institutional framework set by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In this paper we engage cultural critic Jules Boycoff (2014) concept of ‘celebratory capitalism’ to explore the Olympic Games as a specific formation of capitalism that both aligns with, and slices against, the neoliberal zeitgeist. In particular, we examine the effects of Agenda 2020—a major policy document that has been described as a "strategic roadmap" for facilitating more rapid social change in the Olympic movement, including modernization, gender equity and increasing interest amongst youth— particularly on youth-focused sporting cultures. Drawing upon interviews, media analysis and focus groups, we critically explore some of the politics in this modernization process focusing on the events surrounding the attempts to include surfing, skateboarding, BMX freestyle and sport climbing in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. In so doing, we reveal the cultural tensions, politics and power struggles as the IOC moves to include new sports, many of which have long defined themselves in opposition to the sporting establishment.

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PANEL F (ROOM ESS) Colonial Legacies Chair: Holly Randell-Moon Camille Nakhid, Anabel Fernandes-Santana, Margaret Nakhid-Chatoor, and Shakeisha Wilson. Auckland University of Technology Capitalism and a culturally relevant Caribbean research methodology

Research and higher education are sustained through the resources of capital and the outcomes of capitalism. In return, researchers and academics must ensure that the work they produce are in line with the ethos and aims of a capitalist economy. Globalization has shown itself through the various media to be a dominating and consuming presence. Ironically, it has also prompted societies that feel threatened by the possibility of losing their cultural practices to become more active in their survival and maintenance. Higher education in the Caribbean has traditionally been guided by a European and Western system of education undoubtedly resulting from colonization by Europe and accessibility to US academia and research. The pursuit and achievement of qualifications based on these systems are influenced by the rewards that such awards are expected to confer on the achiever both within and external to the Caribbean. University education and research in the Caribbean, therefore, appears to be primarily for capital gain and indifferent to and neglectful of the Caribbean culture of the region in which it occurs. Thus the characteristics of patriarchy, class, and parochialism among others that accompany research and higher education prevail in the society at large. This presentation argues that a Western culture based on capitalism is embedded in the research practices that take place in the Caribbean and results in maintaining a capitalistic hierarchy based on sexism, classism and colourism that is exclusive to an elite group of Caribbean Islanders, and which does little to address the increasing disparities and social injustices in the region. In order to gain an accurate understanding of issues and identify effective measures to challenge the negative impacts of capitalism in the Caribbean, a research approach encompassing Caribbean culture is necessary. It is proposed that such a step will inspire Caribbean intellectuals, academics and researchers to utilize more effective and relevant cultural tools in their ongoing work to contribute to social development in the region.

Jennifer Henderson

Carleton University Neoliberal Gothic and Settler Social Imaginaries Speaking to the cultural politics of neoliberalism, this paper examines the ways in which neoliberal tropes shape processes of public reckoning and atonement in relation to colonial ‘pasts’ in Anglophone settler states. More generally, it contributes to scholarship on the proximity and entanglement of different kinds of ‘anti-statist’ discourses in a moment of widely-diffused neoliberal common sense and culturalist recognition of Indigenous rights. I pursue my critique of the politics that recognizes colonialism as a spatio-temporally confined historical ‘wrong’ by focussing on the work of a public genre I call “residential school gothic.” In Canada this genre mediates the truth-event of cultural genocide through the production of a public memory of Indian residential schools as sites of gothic entrapment. “Residential school gothic” organizes the representation of residential school experience according to the topos and narrative logic of a classically liberal, late 18th-century narrative genre that 45

tells a story of liberation from the hold of the past. The historical gothic is a vehicle for critique of the tyrannical power of the perverse other that is seen to repress the natural order of civil society, the market, and ‘homo economicus.’ “Residential school gothic” draws on this lineage but carries the additional resonances of two elements of late 20th-century discourse, the thematization of child abuse and the argument for deinstitutionalization. Made to signify within this layered gothic register, Indian residential schools have come to crystallize the idea of state capture and regulation, to effect a temporal division between now and then, and a spatial one between colonialism as perverse event within the institution and freedom outside of it. The genre ensures that any recognition of historical violence occurs within a neoliberal imaginary and underlines the need to unblock developmental trajectories, to celebrate the neoliberal resource of ‘resilience,’ and ignore the present reality of hugely disproportionate rates of incarceration of Indigenous populations under neoliberal governance.

Ben Cherry-Smith

Griffith University Protecting elite ontological security: A new perspective on the development of the White Australia policy Prior to 1887, each Australian colony was free to develop its own immigration policy. The ‘White Australia’ policy, therefore, represented a significant shift both in terms of the authority over each colony over its own borders and in relation to the nature of what it meant to be Australian. This paper deals with the development of ‘White Australia’ as a concept and as policy in colonial Australia through the years 1887 to 1888. This was positioned, at the time, as an egalitarian policy aiming, ironically, to prevent the dissemination of racism within society. Academics have primarily examined this subject in relation to notions of maintaining Britishness and the protection of labour. I aim to contribute to this ongoing academic conversation through exploring the White Australia policy with a new theoretical perspective. Using ontological security and elite theory as theoretical lenses through which to greater understand this policy change, this development is examined using archival resources that highlight the complex and changing relationships between the Chinese, British and the Australian colonial governments. In addition, newspaper archives will be accessed in order to better understand the way in which this new policy was presented to and understood by Australians. I argue that a new reading of the ‘White Australia’ policy is required in order to highlight the relevance of the ontological security of elite Australians to its formation and implementation.

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PANEL TWO DEC 6, 11.40-12.40PM PANEL A (ROOM 5C18) Modes of Resistance Chair: Massimiliano Urbano Jill Massino

UNC Charlotte #REZIST: Popular Resistance to Late Capitalism in Romania Although capitalism is not new to Romania, its neoliberal variant is. What scholars refer to as late capitalism emerged rapidly after 1989, and turned out to be a far cry from what many Romanians envisaged when they hoped (and fought) for communism’s demise. Believing that pluralism would facilitate upward mobility and a more extensive social welfare system, many Romanians were shocked with what characterized the 1990s and 2000s: rampant inflation, corruption, curtailment of social entitlements, and rising inequality. The global financial crisis exacerbated this process, causing the government to adopt harsh austerity measures. In the midst of this tumult, former communist apparatchiks and other elites amassed fortunes, further widening the gulf between the “haves” and “have-nots.” This presentation examines Romanians’ responses to these transformations, illuminating how a country that lacked a dissident movement prior to 1989 became home to some of the largest antistate protests in the region by the 2017. It examines both the mediums and messages employed by individuals to challenge austerity, corruption, and global capitalism. Romanians draw on both old and new to articulate resistance, referencing 1989 and its aftermath (e.g. “the only solution is another revolution”) along with transnational and environmental critiques of capitalism. They also use flash mobs, social media, and hashtags (e.g. #REZIST) as well as candlelight vigils, marches, and protests. These methods have proved successful, forestalling cuts to family allowances, halting foreign extraction of natural resources, and, more recently, killing a measure designed to pardon corrupt politicians by revising the Penal Code.

Jian Xiao

Loughborough University Artistic resistance to urban transformation in China This paper presents a study of artistic resistance to urban transformation in the Chinese social context, exemplified in ‘Everybody’s Donghu (East Lake),’ an art project held in 2010, 2012 and 2014 with the aim of intervening in the commercial development of a scenic urban space, in this case, Donghu (East lake) in the city of Wuhan in China. First, the issue of public space and control will be discussed through reflecting on the Chinese political and economic conditions, thus contextualising the role of artistic resistance in China. Second, it will examine the aesthetics of the practices of resistance, mainly focusing on how specific forms of cultural resistance express the social positions of the participants, 47

thus distinguishing themselves from others. Third, the use of technology in the process of artistic resistance will be studied, concerning the representation of the area through utilisation of online space and the reclaiming of it through tactical production of ‘art’ in a broader sense. Further, it will explore the forms of urban resistance that are not straightforward, but rather, are incorporated into the individual memory, reflection and recreation of an urban space, as well as the collective reconstruction of it through new media. Lastly, informed by Henri Lefebvre’s concept of the production of space, this paper argues that the representation of urban space can be regarded as a form of cultural resistance to power and control in the process of urban transformation, which in turn, reflects a wider context of resistance in an authoritarian country, such as in this case, China.

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PANEL B (ROOM 5C19) Surveillance Chair: Holly Randell-Moon Nguyen Khanh

Massey University Media policy, communist power and surveillance culture in Vietnam The introduction of an amended Press Law by the Vietnamese Communist party in 2016 uniquely represented the relations between the State, media market and citizens. Using critical discourse analysis, the paper examines the significance of the Press Law in the context of the political economy, history and culture of Vietnam, focusing particularly on its ideological assumptions about media policy and practice. The paper highlights the tensions between the media’s assigned function as the “mouthpiece” of the Communist Party and State alongside the contrary expectation that it voices and serves the “public interest” within restricted boundary. Abandoned by law, censorship is still closely exercised by the Communist Party’s Department of Ideology and Propaganda. With a long list of prohibited acts in the media legislation and practice, Vietnam was ranked 175 out of 180 countries in a recent press freedom report and has been described as one of the world’s top five jailers of journalists by the Committee to Protect Journalists. In theories of media and journalism, media law or policy are considered as tools for media accountability. However, in Vietnam, the Press Law attempts to keep the media accountable to the state, but not much to its audience and civil society. This distorted understanding of accountability shapes both the existing rule of law and the authority of surveillance culture in a country where press freedom is still heavily circumscribed, even with a recent expansion of the commercial media sector.

Zita Joyce

University of Canterbury Listening from New Zealand: Secret Station - Secret Power This paper begins from two New Zealand texts that engage with listening, surveillance and New Zealand's role in global networks. One is Ellersley Hall's 1929 adventure novel The Secret Station, in which two plucky young wireless enthusiasts uncover a Russian plot to invade New Zealand from a Pacific Island outpost by disabling broadcast and electrical transmissions. The other is Secret Power by Simon Denny, New Zealand's national exhibition for the 2015 Venice Biennale, which was a "case study of the visual culture of the NSA" (Leonard, 2015: 14), an exploration of the content and imagery of Powerpoint slides released by Edward Snowden. The exhibition takes its name from New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager's 1996 book that exposed the global surveillance network in which the GCSB facilities at Waihopai and Tangimoana are embedded. Through these texts this paper will consider the role of listening in New Zealand national security practices - the fictional listening that protects the nation from communism, the later role of 'listening stations' around the Pacific in the second world war, and the subsequent development of the 5eyes network. The paper argues that these 'listening' practices represent an extension of the nation beyond its physical island boundaries, and highlights the porousness of national boundaries to radio and communications technologies - expressed through fear of foreign intervention in New Zealand, and the extension of New Zealand political power in global surveillance networks. 49

PANEL C (7C09) “Post-Truth” Chair: Kevin Veale Barry King

Auckland University of Technology Trump, Post Truth and the triumph of Market Populism The election of Donald Trump as an apparent figure of anti-establishment ideology has posed what Arlie Hochschild, (2016) identifies in her study of Tea Party adherents, Strangers in their own Land, the great paradox – how do people who have the least to gain from neoliberal de-regulation of big business and the cutting back of welfare and environmental protection rationalize their support for the Trump Presidency? As a communicative strategy, Trumpism represents a new form (or at least, a hitherto submerged form) of populism, which challenges, for example, Ernesto Laclau’s theorization of the fundamental link between populism and empty signifiers. (2005) Trumpism, by contrast works through an affectively replete signifier as an incarnation of market success. This incarnation also projects a particular epistemology. As his ghost written book, Trump: The Art of the Deal repeatedly emphasizes that fundamental facts of social life depend on the ratification of market success. At the Trump’s leadership persona shares with Fascism an epigenetic will to power. In this scenario, the evocation of a golden age that may never have attained a perfect expression in the past can do so in the present through the actions, rather than the words, of a strong leader. Trumpism is proto-fascist because it evokes a fictive golden age of market freedom project the market as the portal to the transcendence of a compromised history– e.g. Make America Great Again. Given this construction what is true is what sells (hence post-truth) and moral superiority is calibrated as market success. This presentation will examine the Trump persona as the medium for this moral calculus or merchant epistemology.

Benedetta Brevini

University of Sydney When neo liberal ideology is not enough: Post-Truth Politics and Australian mining debates While for the last decades western and non-western societies have become acquainted with an unchallenged dominance of neo liberal discourses, the last two years have seen the emergence of what has been dubbed as `Post truth politics”. Post-truth then became the 2016 Word of the Year according to the Oxford and Macquarie Dictionaries. Defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’ (Oxford dictionaries, 2016) Post-truth politics has thus been recognised as a new trend of the Trump and Brexit era. To demonstrate that post truth politics and “truthiness” are not just a very “American” and British phenomenon, we have looked at public discourses on mining in Australia as a case study to investigate the triumph and achievements of this form of political culture that goes far beyond the mantra of neoliberal discourses. 50

We have carefully investigated the way in which politicians and the media in Australia have debated the establishment of the one of the biggest and most controversial coal mines in the world, the Adani Carmichael mine in central Queensland. We found that post-truth politics is not merely a replacement of ‘truth’ with ‘lies’, but instead a complex, overlapping set of discursive strategies that work together to produce very particular political effects. These effects include demonising environmentalists, framing coal mining as essential for Australia’s future, and pitting mine opponents against Australia’s national interest.

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PANEL D (ROOM 7C18) Global Media Chair: Ian Huffer Xiaochun Chen

Southwest University (China) The format transformation of the TV industry: an operation way of capital discourse The television industry, as an important component of the cultural industry, is undergoing the format transformation over the world. This shift means that the TV format replaces the TV program as main body in traditional TV copyright trade and has caused new imbalance in development of industry. The TV format, television production standards, which has been created by the Western capital is not only the output of content products, also the transformation of the market pattern even the domain structure. It means other countries must strive to cope with the international trade deficit in TV format industry. As a cultural product standard that contains ideology, the ideology of the nation manufacturing formats has come into other countries ' opinion market easily. One of the most obvious example is copyright disputes of TV formats have triggered a conflict between international rules with domestic copyright laws and the western countries have more say in constructing of a new international protection system for content industry. This paper will discuss how the capital discourse operate the format transform in TV industry from two aspects. One is about the product standard. How that "Super Formats" has gradually become a general rule by eliminating individualities of different TV programs. On the other hand, how the product standard and the principle "expression of ideas" of the copyright law reach a consensus so that the capital can promote the globalization protection system for the TV format in a bottom-up approach.

Pooja Thomas

MICA Global urban citizenship in regional cinema from Kerala, India. This paper will attempt to understand the ways in which new generation cinema from Kerala, a region in India, constructs the idea of global urban citizenship among diasporic Keralites in other regions of India. Cinema from the regional film industries of India are often rendered invisible in the circulation of Bollywood in the world. However, this particular brand of new age regional cinema from Kerala draws its teeth from young film makers, educated abroad or in professional film schools, who profess an exposure to world cinema. These new voices in regional cinema are elite and speak a particular syntax of global modernity that is familar to third generation diasporic populations in other parts of India as well as elsewhere in the world. Coupled with sophisticated channels of film distribution and better marketing and promotional strategies, these regional films from Kerala have also caught the imagination of young, non-regional, and non-native film viewers in India. To understand these responses to regional cinema in India especially at the site of the city in India, and the complex attributes of the audience it shapes for itself, such an enquiry will naturally turn tobthe vast research on media flows, cinema and the ideology of nationalism/globalization. However, this paper will primarily attempt to use this particular context of consuming cinema to understand the specific kind of urban citizenship engendered in contemporary India. Using 52

ethnographic methods and a discourse analysis approach, the paper will examine discourses of citizenship, globality, and identity that the films negotiate. Since the diasporic location under consideration for this paper is Ahmedabad, one of Gujarat region's largest cities, it will be important to study the social spaces in which such films are consumed, as well as the networks through which they are circulated and consumed. In doing so, this paper hopes to discern this particular moment in the construction of globality at the site of the city in contemporary India.

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PANEL E (ROOM 7D16) Finding a Place to Be Chair: Pansy Duncan Chris Chesher

University of Sydney Commodifying home: real estate advertising and the production of space The moment a home goes onto the market it is transformed from private space into semi-public space, from perceived space into conceived space, from use value into exchange value, and from domestic space into a space of inspection. If space is socially constructed, as Lefebvre argues, the process of promoting and selling residential properties is a commodifying practice that affects the way that space is imagined and experienced under capitalism. Mediated through print media, online platforms and physical staging, each property is framed as desirable but elusive through a multimodal performance of images, locality, property features and narratives. This paper examines how real estate advertising and the rituals of inspection configure property as a commodity, promoting not only the individual place, but also the ideology of real estate. The affordances of web and mobile media have changed advertising, with sites such as Domain, realestate.com.au, realestate.co.nz and trademe property presenting databases that respond to searches with rich media. They support more images of more diverse genres; more text; evocative video, with moving cameras and sometimes drone shots; interactive floorplans and even 3D virtual reality walkthroughs and dollhouse views. These representations of properties bring into focus the significance of class. As the price of real estate gets out of reach for more and more prospective owners, the audience for these advertisements narrows to those who can afford it, against those who experience the sites only as property porn.

Andrew Hickey

University of Southern Queensland Finding Comfort: Comfort as a Condition of Late Capitalist Lifestyle This paper will argue that comfort features as a fundamental marker of late capitalist lifestyle. Taking the position that comfort fulfils predominant concerns in the living of a ‘good life’, this paper will chart how comfort comes to feature as an aspect of everyday, late-capitalist living by surveying the way it is packaged and represented within a series of popular discourses. Significantly, how comfort comes to be consumed and experienced will provide a specific point of critique. The argument central to this paper will draw from the extant literature on comfort as it is (currently) defined through studies of consumption (Shove 2003), but will extend this current scholarship by seeking to chart the affective and corporeal character of comfort. Comfort will hence be positioned as not only a physical ‘state’- a condition effecting the corporeal Self- but equally as an affective response to and with modes of lifestyle and living that this historical moment prescribes. Currently, little research beyond that exploring comfort as an aspect of the built environment, as a psychological condition or physical state of being exists. This paper will hence argue that comfort should be considered more widely as a state of being that maps against the workings of late capitalist social formation, habits of consumption and experiences of lifestyle, and will subsequently set out a research agenda for comfort that Cultural Studies is well-placed to address. 54

PANEL F (ROOM ESS) Communicating Good Health Chair: Sy Taffel Nayantara Sheoran Appleton

Victoria University of Wellington Tracing the medical image: Of methods between cultural studies and visual anthropology Within the visual lies the potential to hide or uncover realities – be they everyday, political, and/or medical. Cultural studies scholars, alongside visual anthropologist have long been committed to project of unpacking the power relations inherent in images, at the moment of their decoding or consumption. Drawing on fieldwork in medical spaces in India, in this paper is a continuation of that interdisciplinary tradition and is aimed at unpacking how medical images (from contraceptive advertising aimed at women to hospital promotional campaigns) circulate within liberalizing societies, like India. I posit, alongside many scholars, that particular cultures of a neoliberal regimen are visible within these advertisements that interpellate patients into imagining themselves as consumers within liberalizing medical spaces. Engaging with Pasi Väliaho’s concept of the ‘biopolitical screen,’ I attempt to extend the analysis to include patients seeking biomedical interventions and using images and media to determine their ‘choices.’ Further, this paper is also a methodological attempt to bring conversations in cultural studies and visual anthropology to bear on each other, as a concrete way in which an interdisciplinary analysis may help unpack and make accessible an everyday medial reality, to a diverse audience. As an interdisciplinary scholar trained in cultural studies and practicing feminist medical anthropology, these conversations are a political project, just as much as a methodological one. In subverting academic boundaries in my analysis of mediated medicine, I find potential spaces for imagining anew a medical space responsive, responsible, and engaged with its citizenry.

Andrew Dickson

Massey University Healthy Food (the Pervert’s) Guide: Capitalising on the Culture(s) of Health Healthy Food Guide is one of the top selling consumer ‘health’ magazines in New Zealand. Their ‘value proposition’, to use the capitalist’s language, revolves around a supposed ethic of trust based on science as Truth: “Why you can trust us. Our advice comes from evidence-based science so you get the facts, not myths and misinformation”. In this paper we will discuss our initial findings from a detailed textual analysis of the headline story in every edition of Healthy Food Guide from its inception in April 2005 to the current day. Our analysis applies a psychoanalytic conceptual framework that seeks to determine, without over-determining, what could be called the libidinal lacanomy (Interpreted via Hook, 2008) of Healthy Food Guide. By reading beneath each story closely we will seek to map the discursive terrain of consumer health interest over the past 12 years in New Zealand, looking specifically for nodal points and fantasmatic 55

narratives in the text "which structure the way different social subjects are attached" (Howarth, Glynos, Griggs, 2016, p. 2) to health discourse. In this way we will use Healthy Food Guide as an entry point into understanding the broader signification network, together with its “cycles of jouissance” (Hook, 2008), which constitutes the ‘health culture’ of the west under capitalism. Further, through aiming to unsettle its "relations of domination" (Howarth, Glynos, Griggs, 2016), we use Healthy Food Guide as an example of the capitalist accumulation that can occur via the appropriation of anxious consumer discontent in this industry; an industry which exploits the ‘worried well’ through the discourse of science.

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PANEL THREE DEC 6, 3.40-5.10PM PANEL A (ROOM 5C18) Making Markets Chair: Bailey Gerrits Marcela Palomino-Schalscha

Victoria University of Wellington Economy, culture and decolonisation: The enactment of diverse and solidarity economies in Alto Bio-Bio, Chile. Colonisation and different forms of resistance have deeply shaped the history and experience of the Mapuche people in Chile until today. Being the country’s largest indigenous group, and marked by the increase in the tensions with their Chilean counterparts in the last decades, the Mapuche are often represented as living “at the margins” or in opposition to the Chilean society and system. Less attention has been paid, though, to the ways in which the Mapuche complicate, diversify and contribute to areas such as the economy in contemporary Chile. This presentation brings together Anglo literature on diverse and post-colonial economies with the work of Latin American, and particularly indigenous, scholars and activists on “solidarity economies” and “Buen Vivir” (or good life). It aims to contribute to the decolonisation of development and economic thinking, examining the links that the economy has with multiple other dimensions and elements usually made invisible in economic discourses. It promotes a reflection on how links with the capitalist economy, while not free of controversies and potentially negative impacts, can also provide an opportunity for the advancement of communities’ wellbeing and self-determination. Examining the particular experience of Trekaleyin, a tourism initiative conducted by four MapuchePewenche communities in Alto Bio-Bio, this presentation will address the intertwined, hybrid and contested ways in which Mapuche communities engage with the economy, enact cross-cultural coexistence and open avenues for deeper forms of decolonisation. It thus explores the practices, knowledges and ontologies that inform the economic arrangements of these communities and their tourism initiative.

Rachel Wallis

University of Southern Queensland Banking on Banjo: business, bias and belonging in rural social imaginaries Rural social imaginaries of escape, abundance and authenticity have been promulgated since A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson wrote his poem, ‘Clancy of the Overflow’. They continue to be popular in today’s neo-liberal, capitalist world, and are often used to promote the business of rural life, including tourist 57

destinations and real estate sales. This research, part of a larger PhD project, examines the rural social imaginaries used by two interview participants to create marketing for their vineyard just outside Stanthorpe, Queensland. Faced with competitors who couldn’t be beaten on price, volume or even perhaps quality, these business owners based their business model on ‘the dream’ often held by citydwellers, of belonging within a bucolic and abundant countryside. For those who can fit within the dream, there is a feeling of belonging and connectedness to the land which is both welcoming and comforting. However, promotion of these social imaginaries brings with it challenges, including homogenous, gendered and racially biased ideas that conspire to exclude women, minority groups and those who don’t fit the normative ideas of the white, male heterosexual predominant in rural social imaginaries. A more open and inclusive discourse is needed if rural society is to remain relevant to today’s globalised, multi-cultural and liberal world.

Russell Prince

Massey University In Vitro Meat and Cow Free Milk: On Making Markets for Synthetic Animal Food Products According to its proponents, synthetic animal food products, such as in vitro or lab-grown meat and synthetic cow’s milk, has the potential to overcome various environmental, health and ethical challenges that have emerged around global animal product consumption and the industrial agriculture that is needed to support it. Apart from the myriad of technical problems making synthetic animal products, critics have pointed out the blurry ontological status of the food and the ethical challenges therein, and have questioned the veracity of the various promissory narratives that are being produced. This paper considers synthetic animal food products from a cultural economy perspective. As a market that currently mostly only exists in potential, a cultural economy perspective can reveal the various social and material relations that comprise the (bio)capital formation that will underpin any market-to-be, an aspect of markets that are often invisible once markets are up and running. Moreover, this perspective details the intimate role markets have in establishing the ethical and ontological aspects of synthetic foods in a political economy shaped by neoliberalisation and financialisation.

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PANEL B (ROOM 5C19) Towards New Understandings of Women’s Sport and Physical Cultural Experiences Chair: Holly Thorpe Grace O’Leary

University of Waikato “It’s just like, the best feeling ever”: Women Sex Worker's Affective Experiences of Sport and Physical Activity in Aotearoa Women sex workers in Aotearoa have previously been ignored in research that focuses on their everyday lived experiences. With an aim to create space for their voices, this project draws on interviews with 17 women sex workers about their experiences of sport and physical activity. In so doing, sport and physical activity provides a unique medium to analyse women sex worker's understandings of the material and symbolic body within and across space. In this paper I focus particularly on women sex workers various motivations, sensations and interpretations of their moving bodies. Employing a poststructural feminist analysis together with affect theory allows for a deeper analysis of embodied subjectivity, while the rich, meaningful experiences of the women combine to reveal truths that transverse and transcend social assumptions about sex worker bodies.

Alison Jeffrey

University of Waikato Investigating the modern Yoga lifestyle through feminist ethnography Yoga in recent years has grown into a movement practice that comprises a multi-billion dollar industry. But yoga was originally presented as a disciplined lifestyle practice solely pursued by men. Being that the lives of devoted Yoga practitioners look largely different from those of the ancient Yogi sages, I became interested in uncovering how Yogis are living today. This research follows the lives of dedicated, female Yoga practitioners with established lifestyle practices to understand their lives and gain insight into how the ancient Yoga traditions are manifesting themselves within the confines of our modern world. As a committed female Yoga practitioner and teacher, both feminist and Yogic theories have informed this research process. This paper will describe how these bodies of thought have influenced my choices as a researcher. I will discuss research design for respect and unity, contemporary methods in ethnography and will reflect on the importance of both reflexivity and cocreation in the building of a body of knowledge surrounding Yoga lifestyles. This presentation will address how we, as responsible researchers with a thirst for knowledge, may work with others to gain insight through methods that encourage peace, unity and progress.

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Nida Ahma

University of Waikato Understanding how Muslim sportswomen are negotiating sporting cultural identities on social media Muslim women have embraced social media with eagerness and are using it in various ways such as civic participation (Eickelman & Anderson, 2003), business, fashion and deliberating gender relations according to their faith (Piela, 2010a; Vieweg & Hodges, 2016). The digital space can offer anonymity, self-expression and potential liberation (Nouraie-Simone, 2014) at the same time there are ongoing risks of online harassment and surveillance. In this presentation, I will discuss my research on how Muslim sportswomen are using social media to represent their sporting identities. I conducted interviews with 21 Muslim sportswomen and digital ethnography of 26 different social media accounts of Muslim sportswomen from around the world across four different platforms (Twitter, SnapChat, Instagram and Facebook) over the course of eight months. The observations and interviews revealed the following three themes: (1) self-branding while keeping religion/culture/sport in their local context; (2) staying connected with family, friends and athletes (locally and globally); and (3) representing their sporting lives to empower other Muslim women. In so doing, this research builds upon and extends existing literature on women, culture and social media, and reveals the importance of considering cultural and contextual issues surrounding digital embodiment.

Belinda Wheaton & Rebecca Olive

University of Waikato Interrogating surfing’s cultures of consumption: Stories of ‘local’ identity and belonging in Aotearoa/New Zealand While surfing culture has widely been represented as embedded in and driven by consumer capitalism, research on the cultures of surfing has been a revealing site in exploring more complex embodied leisure identities, lifestyles and spaces. Until quite recently however, scholarship had centered on core white male surfers and white heteromasculinities. Drawing on ethnographic and auto ethnographic accounts, in this paper we contribute to the growing literature on surfing subjectivities and spaces. Our approach emerges from our understanding that what goes on in surfing spaces – including relations of power, values, connections, many things besides – requires localised analyses that are rooted in the histories and experiences of surfers and places themselves. Extending on a feminist collaboration that allowed us to explore shared and diverse intersections of identity with our experiences of sex/gender in one surfing space (Olive, Thorpe, Roy, et. al 2016), we explore and interrogate our experiences of subjectivity and belonging as Pakeha non-Kiwis (outsiders) living in Aotearoa/New Zealand. We consider our different cultural locations, and our ‘non-local’ and ‘outsider’ statuses inform social relations, inequalities, power and privilege in the cultural and geographical surfing space. Our focus here is on how surfing spaces are shaped by broader effects of colonization, sexism and homophobia. Collaborative reflection, we suggest, allows us to explore collective points of interest, as well as individual blind spots, developing a more intersectional analysis and methodology, which reveals the complicated and nuanced power dynamics at work within such cultures of consumption.

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PANEL C (7C09) Neoliberal Discourse Chair: Sy Taffel Sean Phelan

Massey University What’s in a name? On the use of the concept of neoliberalism This paper examines how the concept of neoliberalism is articulated in political discourse, especially critical left discourse. Instead of offering a focused analysis of the social order signified by the term, I discuss its status as an increasingly visible discursive category for talking about the political and ideological condition of contemporary capitalist societies. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s concept of political antagonism, I argue that the signifier neoliberal performs a necessary political and universalizing function that unifies different features of an oppressive social order under a single categorical heading. For there to be any meaningful politics at all such antagonisms are necessary, otherwise political life would remain stuck in an interminable discussion of micro-level differences, without any proper grasp of the structural contexts in which they are embedded. At the same time, I highlight the problems with overly broad-stroke uses of the concept of neoliberalism, and reflect on its limits as a signifier of political disidentification and conceptual resource for emancipatory critique. I develop the argument by considering another aspect of Laclau’s understanding of antagonism, which brings attention to the heterogeneous discursive elements that go unarticulated in their political construction.

Jorge Valdovinos

University of Sydney Transparency as Ideology The use of the term 'transparency' has increased exponentially, to the point in which it has become an almost unavoidable buzzword in a variety of contemporary discourses. The term's definitions have proliferated in a fragmentary manner, in correspondence with its variegated contexts of application. This has become a considerable difficulty for the disambiguation of the term. As it will be argued, discursive articulations of transparency are a crucial element in efforts to regulate human activity in a normative manner, and are deeply associated with a cluster of concepts that feed into a neo-liberal ethos of governance that promotes voluntary forms of self-exposure and asymmetrical mechanisms of accountability. Almost all of these uses of transparency exploit the semantic ambiguity of metaphorical instantiations of the term. What are the conceptual bases in which these uses of the term transparency are based on, and what grounds are there for treating these assumptions as ideological? As it will become clear in this paper, transparency is hardly the first case of an ambiguous term being employed as part of a rhetorical effort to legitimate the neoliberal project. One of the most important precedents of metaphorical ambiguity this discursive mechanism can be found in the texts of the economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek. This paper will contrast this rhetorical mechanism with some contemporary discourses of neo-liberal globalisation, arguing that the term should be placed in a longstanding history that has influenced our conceptions of access to the real, becoming a crucial element in an ongoing fetishisation of the medium.

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Yiannis Mylonas

Higher School of Economics (Moscow) The “Greferendum” and the Eurozone crisis in the Danish daily press The presentation will be based on the findings of an article that will be published at the journal of Race and Class. It concerns a critical analysis of the press coverage of the so-called ‘Greferendum’, a referendum called by the Left-led coalition government of Greece in July 2015, concerning the future of austerity regimes in the country. The study focuses at the coverage of the particular event by the conservative daily press of Denmark, one of the ‘core’ EU countries, which is not part of the Eurozone. In the last decades, the Danish public sphere has seen the mainstreaming of what has been described as ‘liberal intolerance’, where themes and frames of mind that was considered as typically racist, begun being articulated with liberal terminology, emphasizing cultural ‘deficiencies’ as acute reasons for social problems. This study was based in the collection and analysis of all relevant articles published in newspapers ‘Berlingske Tidende’ and ‘Jyllands Posten’ between the 29th of June, when the decision for the ‘Greferendum’ was publicly announced, and the 17th of July, after the ‘Greferendum’ results became public, and the Greek government’s eventual caving in to its creditors demands (as represented by the ‘Troika’) for the continuation of austerity regimes. The articles selected were read and coded according to the main themes they included in their developing of the Greek crisis, austerity and referendum case. These codes were then organized according to three, interrelated, broad thematic categories, based on relevant critical theory analyzing hegemonic public discourses. The broad thematic categories are “a post-democratic realism”, “the upper-class gaze” and “orientalism and cultural racism”. The study concludes that all newspapers reproduce the prevailing hegemonic frames in favor of austerity that circulate in other European public spheres too. The hegemonic, culturalist-moralistic approach to the crisis is reproduced.

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PANEL D (ROOM 7C18) Constructing Class Chair: Katrina Jaworski Jon Stratton

University of South Australia Pizza and Housos: Neoliberalism, the Discursive Construction of the Underclass, and its Representation There is limited scholarship about Paul Fenech’s television comedy series and films. What there is tends to focus on Pizza (200-2007) and place it, and its spin-off film, Fat Pizza (2003), within what has been called the wogsploitation cycle that includes most prominently The Wog Boy (2000). In this article I discuss two of Fenech’s television series, Pizza and Housos (2011-2013), in the context of representations of the underclass. I argue that the discourse of the underclass has evolved as the Other of neoliberalism in a similar way that the dangerous class, what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, was constructed as the Other of industrial capitalism. The characters in Pizza, with their pitiful below-minimum-wage earnings, exist on the borderline of the underclass while the characters in Housos are immersed in the underclass existence. The film Housos v Authority (2012) is a populist exploration of Australian underclass life.

Teresa Housel

Massey University “If We Had Used Our Heads, We Would Be Set”: Intersections of Identities with First-in-the-Family Status and Growing Up in Working-Class America Using a critical autoethnographic approach (Dykins Callahan, 2008) informed by Orbe’s (2008) theorising of multidimensional identity negotiation, I analyse the intersections between my identities as a first-in-the-family university student raised by a single father in working-class Ohio in the 1970s and ‘80s. Dykins Callahan points out how critical autoethnography “allows narrative explorations of an individual’s lived experiences within the context of her cultural and historical moment” (p. 354). My essay draws on the research of class in America to analyse how my identities are grounded in the larger context of globalisation and the American working class’ sharp decline between the 1970s–‘90s (Cherlin, 2014). Some aspects of my identities are unique to my family dynamics. However, my autoethnography examines how economic and political forces in post-World War II America shaped my family’s flux between stability and devastation (Gest, 2016). When my parents married in the mid-1960s, it was still possible for someone without university education to obtain well-paying factory work with health insurance and retirement pension (Cherlin, 2014). From the 1970s onward, globalisation and its accompanying effects, such as offshoring of labour, dismantling of labour unions, incomes not keeping pace with living costs, and rising consumer debt financially devastated my family in the late 1980s and ‘90s. Guided by autoethnography’s transformative-activist potential, I argue that tertiary institutions must recognise that students’ identity is multidimensional: class identity intersects with other identities. Finally, I offer ways in which institutions can assist first-in-the-family students, who often experience challenging class transitions to university culture. 63

Richard Bromhall

Nottingham Trent University Undoing the Literary Prize: Neoliberalism and Social Class At the close of Paul Ewen’s How To Be A Public Author (2014), the novel’s narrator Francis Plug hangs precariously from a wall in the London Guildhall. Unforeseen by the organisers, Plug has just given a speech to delegates at 2013’s Booker Prize annual ceremony, thanking them for the award he believes he will win the following year, and has scaled a wall to avoid the authorities. This comic moment serves as a metaphor for the social and cultural context. Since 2008, the critical consensus that has emerged from both cultural theory (Crouch, 2011; Mirowski, 2013) and international financial institutions (IMF, 2016) is that the crises of the late 2000s intimated economic neoliberalism’s failure. While this failure is now fully evident, cultural neoliberalism – that is, as Wendy Brown notes, ‘the model of the market […] configures human beings exhaustively as market actors’ (Brown, 2015) – has proliferated. Yet, even neoliberalism's most recent manifestation is increasingly volatile and desperate (Davies, 2016), and Plug comes to embody its increasingly erratic tendencies. This paper will situate Ewen’s novelistic response to literary prize culture in the context of this proliferating cultural rationality. Through the use of comedy and drawing on tropes of working-class literary identities, the novel, this paper will argue, disrupts notions of cultural awards' prestige. In the end, this paper contends, what clings on for survival is not only Plug, but rather literary prize culture itself.

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PANEL E (ROOM 7D16) Entrepreneurship: A Primer Chair: Anna-Maria Murtola Colin Chua

University of New South Wales Innovation, entrepreneurship, and the spirit of digital capitalism This paper addresses entrepreneurship and the spirit of digital capitalism, by theorising and interrogating the ‘myth’ of innovation. It draws on foundational perspectives regarding the spirit of capitalism established by Weber, and later extended by Boltanski and Chiapello. The paper explores the ‘fantasy’ of entrepreneurship as a coping mechanism for the fragmentation and erosion of traditional work arrangements and structures, allowing us to cope with the increased prevalence of what can be called cellular labour (Berardi), and the formation of a precariat class (Standing). Towards this, the paper develops a Vichian-inspired reading of the ‘myth’ of innovation: where Vico argued that myths are not false, but should be understood as systematic ways of seeing, understanding and reacting to the world that people find themselves within. In order to address the fantasy of entrepreneurship and the myth of innovation as significant drivers in our era of digital capitalism, the paper reflects on Schumpeter’s influential account of innovation, entrepreneurship, and creative destruction, applying his account to a world where the multitude acts as the engine of digital capitalism. The paper therefore takes up a materialist approach to ideas, in tracing social, political, economic, cultural realities that are shaped by powerful ideas, and mapping the trajectories of and conflicts contained by specific ideas. It will be argued that the fantasy of entrepreneurship and the myth of innovation are necessary fictions.

Michael Scott

Flinders University From entrepreneurial to assembleur subjectivities This paper explores the weft and weave of contemporary subjectivity. Subjectivity refers to the individual space between the inside and the outside of society; the internalisation of external forces in bodily and mental dispositions. Foucauldian scholars have bequeathed an understanding of the entrepreneurial self as the ideal-typical subject within the neo-liberal era. This subject is incentivised to actively pursue their own wealth and well-being by imagining the self as an enterprise. The entrepreneurial subject then engages in a project to rationally choose, and secure, from an array of market providers the means to achieve individual self-reliance. Notwithstanding such enduring insights into the governing and performance of entrepreneurial subjectivities, a durable criticism of such formal analysis is the neglect of substantive, on the ground issues. My contention is that if this entrepreneurial subject is the weft, then the weave is the assumbleur subject. In French an assembleur is a systems integrator. In the granulated material world of late capitalism the assembleur subjectivity is one that, under more pressing demands of reproducing labour power, acts as the ‘integrator of integration’. Drawing on the heterodox socio-economics of Karl Polanyi, the neo-liberal market coexists with other forms of economic integration: reciprocal gifts, centralised redistribution, and 65

household self-provisioning. Using existing empirical examples, I argue that the temporal strategies of the entrepreneurial subject co-exist with assembleur’s tactics of combining and stabilising individual modes of integration. This emerging form of subjectivity gestures towards the archipelagos of social reproduction in austere societies.

Martin Fredriksson

Linköping University The author, the entrepreneur and the proprietor Traditional theories on the evolution of capitalism often assume that culture is colonized by capital: that the commodification and enclosure of knowledge, ideas and cultural expressions happens as an extension of the accumulation of material resources. This is apparently confirmed by the recent expansion of Intellectual Property Rights, which has turned a wider range of cultural expressions and forms of knowledge into privately owned and commercially exchanged commodities. The commodification of ideas and cultural expressions, however, relies on an individualization of creativity that is significant not only to the cultural economy and the IP-industries, but to an entire entrepreneurial economy where entrepreneurship, in Murtola and Jones’ words, becomes ‘a key ideological operator in the expropriation of the common, through localizing production and claims to value in one particular element of socialized production’ (Murtola & Jones 2012: 635). This individuation of creativity long precedes the emergence of modern IPR. Furthermore, the romantic cult of the original creator and the birth of what Michel Foucault called the ‘Author function’ also precedes the cult of the entrepreneur (Foucault 1969). The question is if the appropriation of culture, through the individualization of authorship, can be seen not as a consequence of entrepreneurial capitalism, but as part of its ideological origins. So rather than being a consequence of the expansion of capitalism, the privatization of culture might be one of its driving forces. Inspired by that thought, I want to relate the idea of the entrepreneur to the deconstruction of authorship that was initiated by Foucault and, Roland Barthes in the late 1960s, and the critique against an author-centered IPR regime developed by law-scholars like James Boyle and Rosemary Coombe in the 1990s. This paper thus asks how the deconstruction of authorship can help us to analyze the ideology of entrepreneurship and the logics of entrepreneurial capitalism.

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PANEL F (ROOM ESS) Political Economy of Schooling Chair: Luk Swiatek Clarissa Carden

Griffith University “Five per cent anti-bullying and 95 per cent gender propaganda”: Representations of Safe Schools in a Queensland newspaper The Safe Schools Coalition Australia program provides resources, including information packages, training, and an eight lesson curriculum, intended to promote understanding of LGBTI young people in Australian schools. This program has been controversial, with opposition enflamed in no small part by inaccurate rhetoric put forward by politicians and some media outlets which positions this antibullying program as a radical intervention into existing gender and sexual norms. In part due to the public outcry caused by such rhetoric, it has been defunded on a national level. This paper explores the response of Queensland’s only major print newspaper, The Courier-Mail, to the introduction and subsequent use of this program in the state from mid-2015. This program has been characterised in this newspaper alternatively as a necessary intervention into existing school cultures and an undesirable act of social engineering. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, I seek to explore these divergent viewpoints in light of broader debates relating to religion, social change, and the role of schools in protecting children and producing good citizens. Fears of Marxism, changing gender norms, and a perceived decline of Christian influence on state education are shown to be key factors in the negative coverage of this program.

Leon Salter

Massey University Articulating the holistic, disrupting neoliberalization This paper draws on my PhD research interviews with New Zealand school-sector activists in order to argue that, despite close to three decades of neoliberalization, there remains a strong alternative vision for the purposes of education in Aotearoa, grounded in humanistic and social democratic ideals. Foregrounding the importance of the affective and the identificatory, as well as the cognitive, “the holistic” articulates the ethics of care, justice, democracy, humanism, fairness and collective agency, all seen as denied by an instrumental coupling of education to economic growth. Such a coupling was found to be reproduced within mainstream media representations, which largely marginalised dissenting voices. However, the holistic found alternative avenues for inscription: such as blogging, organizing, protests and the media campaigns of the NZEI teachers union. While the holistic, as a popular or commons knowledge (Foucault, 1980; Hardt and Negri, 2009), was diffuse and localised, a relative unity was achieved during periods of heightened antagonism, when teachers and their unions were represented within media and political discourse as a self-interested educational establishment, indifferent to the constructed demands of ‘parents’ for greater accountability and transparency. This allowed a name to be given to what the holistic was not: the GERM (Global Education Reform Movement), permitting it to more clearly define its boundaries. Thereafter, increased coherence into a relatively stable opposition contributed to and exploited a key period of authoritative crisis for the hegemonic regime. 67

Nisha Thapliyal

University of Newcastle “Swachh Bharat, Swachh Vidyalaya” (Clean India, Clean Schools): Schooling, sanitation and the cultural politics of neoliberalism of Narendra Modi Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, is reputed both for his power of oration as well as his nuanced understanding of the power of mediatised political spectacle. These characteristics have played a key role in Modi’s political ascendance and his mediatised self-transformation from a right-wing Hindu nationalist to a populist politician and more recently, global statesman. More specifically, Modi’s media-savvy has allowed him to re-package himself as an economic visionary whose ‘Made in India’ brand will finally set the postcolonial nation on the road to development. Today, Modi stands for neoliberal economic growth, good governance, and the reclamation of masculinised national pride. This paper is empirically grounded in a critical analysis of selected public communications by Modi about his Clean India, Clean Schools initiative between 2013 and 2014. These communications include speeches and (scripted) interviews on the occasions of Teachers Day, Independence Day, and the launch of the Clean Schools programme. The use of cleanliness as a metaphor for educational and national progress provides an opportunity to interrogate the cultural politics of neoliberalism. This paper develops around three questions: What does cleanliness symbolise for India? What does cleanliness symbolise in and for capitalism? And, why are students tasked with 'cleaning up' the nation? I argue that Modi’s discourse of cleanliness works to normalise and legitimise unequal power hierarchies in relation to caste, class, gender, and the natural environment.

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PANEL FOUR DEC 7 11-12.30PM PANEL A (ROOM 5C18) Inventing and Imagining Economies Chair: Michael Scott Russell Prince

Massey University Made to measure: inventing the New Zealand economy It is a surprise to many to learn that the economy was not heard of before the 1930s. But in the Official New Zealand Yearbook, published annually since 1893, no mention is made of ‘the economy’ in the sense we use it today until that decade. It was during this period that deteriorating social conditions forced a reimagining of the role of government and the economy emerged as a meaningful sphere, distinct from society and culture. Today it is hard to imagine political discourse without it. The idea that the winners of an election will be those most trusted to ‘manage the economy’ is a persistent piece of political wisdom. It seems that our ideas of what ‘the economy’ is cannot be separated from what we think is the task of government, and so the very nature of the contemporary state. Indeed, the post-imperial nation-state system we take for granted is a relatively recent invention, only taking shape after World War Two, in part through the development and consolidation of new ways of understanding and, importantly, measuring the problems societies faced. New Zealand is positioned neither in the centre or the periphery of the capitalist world, but made use of new ideas and methods of statistical measurement and analysis in at around the same time as places like the US and UK. As such New Zealand can provide a distinctive perspective on the ongoing development of longstanding global technocratic networks and their consequences for how we are governed.

Harmony Siganporia

Maryland Institute College of Art Constructing ‘national culture’ around imagined economies: India and the curious case of Patanjali Scholars have argued that the national economy – the nation personified in terms of/as its economy – is the symbolic rallying point around which the idea of India has long been grafted and continues to be perpetuated. From its depiction as ‘enslaved’ in colonial times to being enshrined at the heart of the nation-building processes which marked the early years of post-independence India, the national economy is one of the symbols every competing ideological vision of India has sought to deploy in different ways (Deshpande, 1993). The General Elections of 2014 swept the right-leaning ultra conservative and big-business friendly Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) into power in India. The three years since have seen the meteoric rise of a local FMCG giant which is the brainchild of an ascetic named Baba Ramdev. This company, Patanjali, 69

is today valued at just over Rs. 10,000 crores (US$1560 million), has a portfolio of over 500 household goods, and is India’s second largest consumer goods company. To be read in the narrative crafted around Patanjali products is a return to the notion of the enslaved Indian economy of yore, with new villains here cast – foreign multinational players standing in for the role the English once played within the colonial framework – from whom India (starting conveniently with the economy) must be saved. This sort of insular hyper-nationalist rhetoric is on the rise world over, and even in the Indian context, this new ‘swadeshi’ (home-grown or locally made) movement seeks to create, in its own words, ‘patriots’ out of consumers, forging a new national culture on the anvil of an overtly capitalist base, even as it deploys rhetoric and symbols made popular by the Indian nationalist movement in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. This paper seeks to critically analyse these tropes, and question the specious amalgamation of conspicuous consumerism and nation building deployed in Patanjali’s communication. In so doing, it seeks to revisit the question of the role played by the national economy today, in this iteration of India’s dreaming.

Peter Thompson

Victoria University of Wellington Making up the Numbers? A critical communicative perspective on financial accumulation and crisis in the wake of the credit crunch. The turmoil in the financial markets following the sub-prime mortgage crisis and the credit crunch has had severe repercussions for other spheres of society. Governments have expended hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars propping up the banking system in order to avoid systemic financial collapse while austerity measures have seen significant cuts in public services and welfare provisions. Public policy questions are being raised about the sustainability of the monetarist macroeconomics and neoliberal policy settings, and media discourses have sometimes been highly critical of the finance sector. However, fundamental questions about the nature of financial asset values and the creation of money through the issuance of private credit remain largely peripheral to mainstream policy debate, even though they lie at the heart of the recent crises. Although Marx provided the seminal critique of capitalism’s internal contradictions, his work on creditmoney and financial accumulation processes were never fully developed. However, the more recent work of Hyman Minsky usefully emphasises the role of credit systems in financial markets’ endogenous tendency to generate instability. Drawing on the author’s empirical studies of financial investment and journalism both in New Zealand and the City of London, this paper proposes to extend a Marxist critique of contemporary financial crises using Minksy’s financial instability hypothesis. This requires both a political economic account of accumulation and crisis and a cultural economic framework emphasising symbolic interaction and shared epistemic frameworks. Combining these perspectives requires recognition of the reflexive communicative processes underpinning credit-money forms and fictitious financial values. This will highlight the role of mediation and communication systems in financial systems and link the selfreferentiality of financial processes and meanings to financial bubble-crisis cycles.

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PANEL B (ROOM 5C19) Politics Online I Chair: George Elliott Aifeng Zhang & Yao Haoyun

Yangzhou University The Cultural Politics of Internet Public Opinion At present, micro communication which based on Weibo, WeChat, micro video and news APP has become the new mode of transmission. Micro communication is changing the media structure and ecology of public opinion , also helping the rise of cultural politics. Cultural politics focus on cultural power relations and conflict. Cultural politics of internet public opinion express in: micro communication gather the power of daily life practice, and promote social reform. qInternet users broke a single pattern, and reconstructed the cultural power relations in new media platform which relying on the power of micro discourse aggregation. In the era of traditional media, the discourse which have been suppressed, ignored, marginalized, are releasing in the micro communication, also constantly reshaping the internet public opinion. Cultural politics has the function of the balance and diversion to improvement and progress of social politics, but also has problems of personal, entertainment, consumerism, ethical anomie. It can not get the real meaning until further optimize and promote the social integrity in the process of social reform.

Alex Beattie

Victoria University of Wellington The flipside of the divide: mediatisation, attention economics, and the privilege to disconnect Digital divisions are as amorphous as the Internet itself. In this paper I respond to a call for critical perspectives of ubiquitous media and an expansion of digital divides research, including an examination of the contexts structuring digital media technologies themselves and not just the contexts of users. Drawing upon the concept of mediatisation and a subset of political economy theory, namely, the attention economy, I posit than an emerging digital divide in cultures of ubiquitous connectivity, is an inequality of disconnection. In other words, in media rich cultures - aside from divisions of access or literacy, there exists divisions of egress. Factors including the co-dependence of media and everyday practice, the habitualization of media use, the appropriation of attention, and industry micro-practice affects, simultaneously normalise connectivity, while amplifying the demand to disconnect. Surveying a range of disconnective products, including ad-blockers, productivity apps, dumb phones, and digital detoxes, I argue that capitalism has co-opted and commoditised disconnection, individualised the problem of collective distraction, which in-turn reinforces neoliberalism and the market colonization of everyday practices. Paradoxically, this emerging digital divide is the flipside of the original division of access, stressing that digital divides do not reflect problems of technological diffusion, but rather, structural inequalities.

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Tim Jurgens

Massey University “Controversial” Commentary, Video Monetization, and the coming (or ongoing) YouTube ‘AdPocalypse’: Cheap technology, a DIY mentality, and the non-linear, crowd-driven environment of YouTube has allowed alternative news media channels to find varying degrees of economic viability. Through quick interpolation of older advertising motivations this active, attention-scarce ecology of consumption offers audiences boundless alternative entertainment while affording content creators the ability to proportionately convert views into dollars. Much of this seemingly at the expense of older forms of media. Through Darwinian mechanisms the channels which thrived survived – offering a platform largely free of the corporate or political constraints which mainstream news media sources are often obliged to. Advantageously or not, this ecology promoted a plurality of political and current affairs commentary. Then came the AdPocalypse. In late 2016, after a complaint from a coalition of advertisers regarding their brands being promoted in association with hate speech, YouTube drastically altered its process through which it deemed content "advertiser-friendly", indiscriminately screening out videos which include "controversial or sensitive content … even if graphic imagery is not shown." (YouTube Help, 2016). Subsequently, many legitimate channels relating to news/political commentary have had their advertising income drastically reduced, often by 85% or more, threatening their existence through economic strangulation. Will this perceived overcompensation diminish the variety and/or efficacy of news and political discussion via YouTube? Will the viability of YouTube as an alternative media platform remain intact for professional content creators? Or will the new news media simply adapt to an ecosystem in flux?

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PANEL C (7C09) Social/Digital Media and New Formations of Chinese Diaspora (Part One) Chair: Haiqing Yu This panel aims to bring together original research papers from a diversified range of disciplines in arts, humanities, and social sciences to examine the role of digital and social media platforms and practices in forging news ways of civic engagement among the highly diversified and stratified Chinese diaspora around the world. Key issues to be discussed include: o What are the newly emerging digital and mobile communication practices among Chinese diasporas and how do they impact on their social and political life in their host countries; o To what extent do these digital practices create new forms of civic engagement and enable Chinese migrant communities to participate in public life in their host city/country; o What are political, social and economic impacts of their flexible place-making practices via digital and mobile platforms among the Chinese diaspora (such as the widespread use of WeChat) on their host countries and societies—both opportunities and challenges? Existing scholarship on Chinese diaspora and diaspora media has focused on how the Chinese diaspora use various media and communication platforms and networks to maintain connections to the “Motherland” and to reconstitute the home abroad. Recent work has traced new developments in diaspora Chinese media, updated the current landscape of diasporic Chinese media and communication (particularly with the proliferation of digital platforms and new modes of communication), and documented the impact of China’s soft power initiatives and “going global” policy. It has also pointed to a new, and seemingly intractable, tension: the emergence of stronger links between new migrants in the diaspora and China in on the one hand, and a continuous desire for a global, postmodern and hybrid Chinese diasporic identity, on the other. This tension is played out in the process of media production, circulation, and consumption, and it manifests itself most acutely through individual digital media practices in the cyberspace and on mobile devices. This panel takes a critical look at Chinese digital diaspora’s embodied and emplaced media and cultural practices mediated via social/digital media, as they negotiate their transcultural, transnational and yet geo-local identity, networks, relationships, and politics. We call for papers that will examine everyday patterns and strategies, sacrifices, and ingenuity of Chinese digital diaspora of various human variables (age, gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, race, disability, and linguistics), as they live out the cosmopolitan identity and lifestyle through both online and offline encounters with real people. We encourage critical analyses of social inclusion/exclusion and power relations embedded in placemaking practices of Chinese digital diaspora and how such digitally mediated place-making practices impact on their citizenship accumulation and sociopolitical life in their host countries and communities. It is our hope that papers in this panel will update our understanding of the Chinese digital diaspora in the era of China’s rise, contribute to the theorization on flexible and digital citizenship, and above all, draw out real and potential implications of these insights on Australian, New Zealand and other host countries’ public life, especially in regard to the national aims of strengthening democracy, building cohesion in a multicultural society, and developing cultural, trade and economic relations with China.

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Elija Cassidy & Xu Chen

Queensland University of Technology Blued, Tantan and emergent Digital dating cultures among the Australian Chinese diaspora This paper presents research in progress on digital dating cultures amongst members of the Australian Chinese diaspora. In particular, it looks at the ways that Chinese dating applications, such as Blued and Tantan, fit into diasporic users’ everyday engagements with ‘homeland’ digital media. Drawing on an initial phase of data collection involving the ‘walkthrough’ app study method (Light et al, 2016) and a series of semi-structured interviews conducted across two associated programs of research, we explore here how dating app use fits into broader diasporic processes around identity negotiation and the development of strategic personal and cultural networks in new environments. As existing research about digital Chinese diaspora has focused on the use of webbased services (see, for example, Hao, 1999; Yin, 2015), academic work on Chinese mobile dating platforms is limited, despite the increasing dominance of Chinese firms in the development of such technologies (see, Hernandez, 2016). This paper therefore contributes not only to understandings of the digital Chinese diaspora, but also to the expansion of knowledge around digital dating cultures, understandings of diasporic media use, and Chinese digital media more generally.

Susan Leong

Curtin University Productive Frictions: the Malaysian, Singaporean and PRC (People’s Republic of China) Chinese Diasporas in Australia This paper consolidates data and findings from a body of work on migrants to Australia from China, Malaysia and Singapore spanning 2009-2016. By extracting data specifically on migrants of Chinese descent, it posits that the linguistic and cultural distinctions (and similarities) between these three communities extend to their social media practices and world-views. Further, that these social media practices inflect how individuals from these communities understand and engage with Australian civic culture. Resulting, at times, in substantive differences and frictions on issues, profound and mundane, within what is often erroneously regarded as a monolithic Australian Chinese diaspora. By incorporating Tsing’s notion of productive fiction (2005) in its analysis of these entangled modernities this paper asks what and how such frictions might contribute to the migrant project of belonging.

Haiqing Yu

University of New South Wales Tongshi on the Move: Mobile Place-Making Practices Among Young Gay Chinese This article focuses on the transcultural place-making experience of first-generation, gay, and young Chinese migrants (18-35 years old) in negotiating their cultural and sexual identities in Australia. In particular, it investigates their negotiations with Chinese and homosexual identities online and via social media as they migrate to Australia and have intercultural contacts with Chinese and non-Chinese (gay) communities (especially in Sydney and Melbourne). Drawing from formal interviews with 12 men and personal communication with 10 men, this article explores how 74

Chinese gay men use digital media to reconstitute the home abroad and to live out their transnational gay identity, politics and desire. Their place-making practices, as they travel from China to Australia and from other city to another, are intrinsically mobile and liberating, while at the same time immobile and limiting when they confine themselves in either online gay enclaves or ethnic capsules.

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PANEL D (ROOM 7C18) Theorising Capitalism and Culture Chair: Nicholas Holm Michael Goddard

University of Westminster Culture, A Reactionary Concept? Capitalistic Culture, Expressive Practices and Cultural Techniques In one of the talks gathered together as Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Felix Guattari provocatively rejects notions of counterculture and subculture claiming that “there is no such thing as popular culture and highbrow culture, there is only capitalistic culture, which permeates all fields of semiotic expression. … There is nothing more horrifying than making a eulogy of popular culture, or proletarian culture, or whatever. There are processes of singularization in certain practices, and there are procedures of reappropriation, of co-optation” (Guattari, 1982, 33). For Guattari, culture is not a liberating but a reactionary concept, “ a way of separating semiotic activities … into spheres to which people are referred. These isolated activities are [then] standardized and capitalized to suit the dominant mode of production” (21). This is not because Guattari was unaware of different concepts of culture from its elite definition in terms of high culture, to its ethnographic meanings as the way of life of a given society, which via Raymond Williams would be the concept of culture used in cultural studies. In fact it is the overlaying of these various meanings that is problematic for Guattari. This talk will consider what the consequences are of considering all culture capitalistic culture, and where this might leave expressive practices such as radical media; can modes of mediated expression be detached from concepts of culture and even counterculture and subculture in order to focus on modes of semiotic singularisation? Is culture a word that needs to be abandoned altogether in order to affirm creative and resistant practices? It will suggest that perhaps the recent turn towards cultural techniques in German media theory offers one possible solution to the impasses surrounding the work culture, provided the latter is considered entangled with techniques and technics, rather than as a separate, totalisable sphere.

Kenneth Surin

Duke University Marx and limits: the discourses of race, cultural, and national identity Marx applied the distinction between the two kinds of `exteriority'-- the insurmountable `barrier' on the one hand, and the more breachable 'limit' on the other-- to the ceaseless vitality of capital. This distinction can also be applied to notions of racial differentiation alas so integral to the dynamics of social and cultural reproduction. Irrevocable transformations have turned ostensible 'barriers' between societies and cultures into mere 'limits', and these 'barriers' have become shiftable 'limits'. Whereas there had once been 'barriers' between societies and cultures, there are now only 'limits' (this being a consequence of capital attaining the phase of real subsumption-- capital being the solvent generating an ‘all that is solid melts into air’ world). This accounts for the sheer inanity of many discussions involving race and immigration, which are premised on notions of (say) ‘real Englishness’ as opposed to the ersatz ‘Englishness’ of the immigrant. But here we encounter the problem of providing a specification of a concept in terms of its internal 76

determinations (i.e. within its `limits'). And so while the presence of a conceptual 'barrier' (Schranke) between being English and being Indian and being French, etc., makes the difference between them relatively easy to specify (we simply use the operation of negation — to be English is not to be Indian, not to be French, etc.); when we seek to grasp the concept of 'being English', within its limits, however, its internal determinations become much harder to enumerate satisfactorily. What marks someone or something as 'being English'? Betting on the Grand National? But not all English persons gamble, let alone bet on horses. What about being a subject of the Queen of England? But Australians are also the Queen's subjects. In the ‘frictionless’ worlds of real subsumption, the difference between 'a real X' and the 'non-native X' is relativised, and the operation of negation becomes difficult to perform. Negation does not in itself enable one to specify a concept's determinations: a rose is not a lily, but saying that something is not a lily, etc., in no way indicates what it is that makes a rose a rose, since being an aardvark is just as compatible with being a non-lily as being a rose is. The full set of internal determinations of any concept, when apprehended at its 'limit', can always only be approached asymptotically. To be 'authentically' English can be deemed possible, certainly, but this never amounts to anything more than someone's being in effect 'sufficiently' English. Desire, fantasy, and culturally-imposed contrivance have unavoidably to do the rest, as writers on race and nationality such as Benedict Anderson and Balibar remind us.

Raphaël Nowak

Griffith University 'The relevance of ‘genre’ for (cultural) sociology' Genre is a central organisational principle in cultural / everyday life. It differentiates, structures and articulates culture (see Beer, 2013; Frow, 2015). The category of ‘genre’ ties together mundane practices (of identity construction and management, cultural consumption, interpersonal communication etc.) with macro and structural processes (Luders et al., 2010). In that regard, genres are ‘processes’ (Neale, 1990) that are crucial to ‘meaning-making and to the social struggle over meaning’ (Frow 2015: 10). Indeed, genres are similar to words possessing ‘formal features’ and defined by ‘discourse communit[ies]’ (Frow, 2015), hence they are the ‘primary framework’ (Mittell, 2004) to think about the articulation and configuration of identity, belonging, and communication in contemporary culture. In contemporary capitalist societies, the cultural landscape is complex, multiple and diverse. New systems of classification (tags, playlists etc.) emerge and coexist with generic categories, whilst, in the meantime, individuals are said to become more eclectic and engage with a diverse range of cultural genres (see Peterson, 1992; Glevarec and Pinet, 2012). Despite their prominence for cultural / everyday life, genres are primarily mentioned in cultural studies and cultural sociology to anchor individuals’ repertoires of tastes and practices. However, ‘genre’ is largely under-conceptualized (outside the scope of literary studies), and little is thus said about how genre is understood, defined and used by individuals in everyday life (see Frow, 2015). This paper will open a conversation about how to sociologically understand ‘genre’, and it will make a case to inscribe the concept of ‘genre’ in the agenda of cultural sociology.

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PANEL E (BLOCK 10, PRESENTATION D) Capitalist Fictions Chair: TBA David Shumway

Carnegie Mellon University It's [Not] a Wonderful Life: What Capra's Film Reveals about Capitalism Today It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra's 1947 celebration of small-town life in the U.S., is a powerful expression of petty-bourgeois class consciousness. Our hero, George Baily, owns a small bank, and he is firmly placed between the evil, haute-bourgeois Potter, and the working-class who are represented by several minor characters. (It is important that African Americans and Latinos are not a part of this hierarchy.) In the film's vision of Bedford Falls if Baily had never been born, the community becomes a something almost straight out of Marx, where there are but two classes, one of them oppressed, and the civic virtues of the petty-bourgeois Baily have disappeared. In the 21st century, this vision has largely been fulfilled in the U.S. and at least some other older industrialized nations, although not exactly as Capra imagined. The problem is not nefarious local capitalists, but a lack of them. At the heart of Bedford Falls' economy were locally owned businesses of all sizes. The number of such businesses has consistently fallen since the 1970s, as local banks, factories, corporate headquarters, and retail stores of all kinds, were taken over, replaced, or closed by national or international corporations. As a result, the petty bourgeoisie is much reduced in numbers. The hollowing out of the middle in these small towns affected more than just the petty bourgeois themselves, as their spending supported a significant percentage of the working class. The remaining petty-bourgeois felt the loss of their formerly wonderful life acutely, and they voted for Trump.

Yafei Lyu

University of Canterbury Chinese Elements in Hollywood Films In this paper, I will chiefly analyse the Chinese elements appeared in Hollywood blockbusters in recent years from the perspective of soft power and cultural globalisation. Since 1994, China has started to introduce Hollywood films on a revenue-sharing basis. However, if Hollywood films would like to get access to Chinese film market, they will meet three barriers, the first one is the censorship system, the second is the quota system, and the third is the not self-decided releasing dates. Due to the average 30% increase in China’s national box office revenue each year since 2008, especially China becoming the second largest film market in the world in 2012, more and more Chinese elements have appeared in Hollywood blockbusters. Five types of Chinese elements are summarized, Chinese filming locations, Chinese product placement, Chinese renowned actors as cameo roles, the positive plots about China, and Chinese-themed Hollywood films. I will make case studies to analyse these categories. In my view, incorporating exotic elements is the market strategy of Hollywood to appeal to Chinese censors and Chinese audience to circumvent the policy barriers and get access to Chinese film market, and the result of the spontaneous choice of economic rules promoted by globalisation.

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Celina Bortolotto

Massey University Shameful sins: a Reaction to Capitalist Ethics in No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2006) No quiero quedarme sola y vacía is a fictionalized autobiographical account of Puerto Rican author Angel Lozada’s misadventures in the early 2000s gay scene in New York. The main character, La Loca 1 is characterized as the ultimate narcissistic antihero: he is lazy, envious, eats too much fat, lives obsessed with his image and with sex, wants to own more and more and has rage fits when he cannot have it all. Immersed in a context where, as Max Weber argues, the “spirit of capitalism” acts as a system of ethics per se, driven by the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit and, above all, the idea of a duty of the individual towards the increase of his capital as an end in itself, 2 la Loca fails repeatedly to live up to both capitalist and moral standards. This presentation will discuss how Lozada’s characterization of La Loca, even if over ten years old, is still relevant today as it questions the ideals of free agency offered by consumerist capitalism and the urban gay male stereotype under the promise of a liberating “gay lifestyle.” The analysis aims to further invite reflection on the concepts of virtue and value constructed under US Protestant capitalism: the former as emancipatory guilt; the latter as the specific status society grants to objects, practices and people creating, in turn, subjects whose value is purely economic versus those whose lives are deemed (morally) valuable in themselves.

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Term that means “crazy woman” and also “faggot” in Spanish. Weber, Max. The Protestant ethic and the" spirit" of capitalism and other writings. Penguin, 2002. Print. 79 2

PANEL F (ROOM ESS) Queer Media Attachment Chair: Lee Wallace Often associated with camp, the queer capacity to affectively attach to outmoded media, legacy genres and stars runs counter to capitalism’s insistence on disposability. Yet, like all forms of attachment, the queer attachment to particular media forms is always ambivalent. That is part of its satisfaction. The papers on this panel address media attachment from the perspective of queer theory. Collectively they comprise a sustained engagement with notions of queer remediation, or the repetition of affects across different media forms. The media forms considered by the panelists include melodrama and other narrative genres of loss and survival, the Hollywood comedies of remarriage, celebrity closets and recovery television. The queer resonances of these media forms speak to principles of continuity, sustainability and survival in times that are otherwise associated with rise of homonormativity, particularly in association with neoliberal ideals.

Melissa Hardie

University of Sydney Attachment to the Closet A spectre is haunting queer theory—the spectre of the closet. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the opacity of literary language was a privileged carrier of closet epistemologies such as the open secret. Less stable and less predictable, though, is the closet’s persistence, and pertinence, in the mesh of competing media interfaces that currently structure cultural modes of instatement and revelation. In this paper I ask how closet epistemologies retain influence in an everyday culture marked by media transparency rather than opacity. Without the literary infrastructure of figuration as aesthetic sprezzatura, how do celebrity narratives of coming out negotiate the extraordinary as a practice of the ordinary? How does coming out – which is, after all, equally the announcement of a closet as it is the pronouncement of its demise—maintain its capacity to complicate and denaturalise discourses of sexual identity and disclosure, especially or indicatively when they are made in simple, unambiguous statements of ‘gay’ or ‘queer’ identity? Is the closet immune to media change? I’ll address these questions with reference to what I am calling Jodie Foster’s Closet Trilogy: Panic Room (2002), Flightplan (2005), and The Brave One (2007). 189

Annalise Pippard

University of Sydney Attachment and Detachment What is the nature of our attachment to television and its celebrities? Since the early 2000s, cultural criticism has emphasised the remedial role of reality television in promoting the neo-liberal values of self-discipline, competition, and consumerism as keys to the good life. But while the lens of political economy usefully draws out the compulsive circuitry of reality television as an endless cycle of addictive spectacle that keeps the viewer hooked, it tends to gloss over the female coding of the attachment dramas at the heart of the form. In this paper I use the 2014 Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) docuseries, Lindsay, to offer an alternative account of convergence-era addictive spectacle. The way the series tracks Lindsay Lohan’s post-rehab life reveals the ambivalent attachment activated 80

by reality television and its affective association with maternal melodrama, a form that builds on the recognition that attachment always carries with it the possibility of detachment. As we watch Lindsay Lohan strategically adjust to the constraints and possibilities of reality television as a means of celebrity image adjustment, we also witness the rehabilitation of television as a respectable cultural form. 185

Amy Villarejo

Cornell University Attachment and Loss Attachment and loss are not diametrically opposed poles but imbricated waves of experience and sensation mediated under capitalism. Through the twin lenses of capitalist perception (common sense and the culture industries), of course, we know something of loss and grief, shattering and undoing: queer media, especially in addressing AIDS and its devastations, have carved a speciality in tragedy. As the history of cinema and TV shows us, the mere fact of being queer often results in the finality of death, as though we are doomed to mourn each other as soon as we defiantly and sensuously enter the lifeworld. And yet what of the textured and attenuated experience of loss and survival? In this paper, I draw upon disability and queer studies to explore disease and decline, attachment in the face of loss. How does queer loss find generic homes for its expression? What visions of embodiment and sensation can register queer disability and the modes of living that thrive nonetheless?

Lee Wallace

University of Sydney Reattachment All marriage is gay marriage. I draw this preposterous idea from Stanley Cavell’s famous account of the Hollywood comedies of remarriage, a cycle of films that arose in the 1930s and early 40s when marriage was unsanctified by the easy availability of divorce. The popular success of films such as The Philadelphia Story (1940), in which Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn start out divorced but end up remarrying, reflects a complex reattachment to marriage that, in the wake of divorce, must necessarily be approached as remarriage, as a revitalized commitment to a socially de-idealized form. In our historical moment when the institution of marriage has been further unsanctified by the social acceptance of gay marriage, a cycle of gay and lesbian films has emerged that interrogate the terms on which marriage must be reimagined yet again as a viable social and sexual practice or, as its critics propose, abandoned outright. Where Cavell argues that post-divorce all marriage is remarriage, I propose that post-marriage equality, all marriage is gay marriage, at least for the popular purpose of renegotiating a general attachment to the form.

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PANEL G (BLOCK 10, PRESENTATION E) Capitalist Techno-Affects Chair: Elizabeth Stephens Elizabeth Stephens

University of Queensland “It’s Alive!”: Semi-Living Machines and Other Experiments in Post-Industrial Biology “Living cells are the factories of the future” (“bioneer” Suzanne Lee, CEO of Biocouture) This paper considers a second, and newly emergent, ambivalent figure of techno-capitalism: that of the semi-living machine, or technological object with integrated organic components. From Steve Potter’s “hybrot,“ widely hailed as the first robot with an organic brain, to Kit Parker’s “medusa,” an artificial jellyfish powered by light-activated muscles cells, to George Church’s use of DNA as a digital storage device, biological materials and living systems are currently the object of widespread experimentation by biotech companies, biomakers, and biohackers, exploited for their capacity as organic processing components within technological systems. The result is the imminent emergence of a whole new class, or perhaps species, of things: what Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr have called the “semi-living” or “partially alive.” These new hybrid bio-technological entities problematize the distinction between the living and non-living, and thus raise a number of important ontological and political questions. Most urgently: how must our current understanding of biopolitics and bioethics be reconfigured in light of this transformation of the category of the “bio” itself? This paper seeks to address such issues by considering the new affective economies from which semi-living machines emerge, and the complex networks of hope and anxiety, wonder and fear, to which they give rise.

Karin Sellberg

University of Queensland The Techno-Affect of Prognosis This paper considers a third form of techno-affective economy, similarly ambivalently positioned between past, present and future concerns: the techno-affect of prognosis. I will investigate a range of prognostic apps, currently used in Australian and other Western medical practice. By inputting age, sex, life style and medical history, doctors are presented with the possibility of calculating the risk of their patients developing a heart condition, or other potentially life-threating diagnoses in the next 5, 10 or 20 years. These apps are increasingly used to regulate patient health advice and treatment, creating a health profile that is based as much on the future, as on present and past physical realities. My paper will consider the type of affective relationship that appears between doctor and patient (mediated through the app), and the sense of self such temporally complex physicality produces. As Catherine Malabou argues in Before Tomorrow (2016) the future-facing technologies of contemporary life are constructing a new multi-temporal ontology. This paper will refer to Malabou’s construct of temporality and self alongside Marie-Luise Angerer’s work on temporality and affect (2014), to articulate the affective economy that makes up the prognostic self.

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Michael Richardson

University of New South Wales Drone Capitalism Like so many technologies before it, the drone promises liberation from the burdens of human existence: from work, wanting, waiting and even war. The drone, we are told, will watch our cities and our borders, it will deliver our goods and dispose of our enemies. It will do all this while keeping human bodies—or, rather, certain select human bodies—safe from harm (Chamayou 2015). Yet as Mark Andrejevic (2015) argues, once the drone is abstracted away from the unmanned aerial vehicle and understood as the figure of autonomous, sensing technology, its logics become ubiquitous. Essential to the emergent drone assemblage and to the affective form of its promise is the rising tide of technocapitalism: military manufacturers, tech giants, start-ups, robotics labs, venture capitalists (Benjamin 2013, Gusterson 2017). This enfolding of military, industry and finance capital into the networked and mediating infrastructures of contemporary life enables a technical and logistical apparatus of planetary enclosure, what Ian Shaw (2016) calls the Predator Empire. Thus the promise of the drone is also the promise of a future transformed: of modes and flows of capital freed even further from the strictures and constraints of human labour; of space and temporality controlled; of threat and freedom held in abeyance. Tracing the movements of drone capital in military expenditure, automated finance and logistics, this paper maps the affects of hope and anxiety that accumulate in and around the ambivalent figure of the drone: the object, promise and figure of techno-capitalism.

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PANEL FIVE DEC 7, 1.30-3PM PANEL A (ROOM 5C18) Biopolitics, Biopower and Media (Part One) Chair: Allen Meek Theories of biopolitics and biopower in the work of Foucault, Agamben, Esposito, Hardt and Negri and others have been widely discussed in recent years, but specific applications of these ideas in media and cultural studies remain under-researched. These two panels feature papers that address the different roles that media technologies play in apparatuses of knowledge, power, sovereignty, territory, security, surveillance, law and governance and in economies of labor, consumption and attention. Scholars of visual media such as Sekula, Beller and Mirzoeff have shown how early photography and film were shaped by the drive to capture, classify and simulate life as physiognomy, movement and gesture. More recent research by Pugliese, Valiaho and others have shown how these tendencies continue and are extended by digital technologies. Theories of biopolitics challenge us to think about media beyond established conceptions of representation and political economy by examining the ways that audio-visual media record, archive, and analyze biological life; enmesh social existence in information networks and harvest it as data; and define human subjects in terms of racial and species hierarchies. These panels will include research that addresses these questions and engages with this vital and still emergent area of media and cultural studies.

Kyra Pearson

Loyola Marymount University The Temporal Dimensions of Capitalism’s Complicity with the Carceral State In cultural studies, research exploring the relationship between capitalism, biopower, and time has elaborated the temporal dimensions of precarity under global capitalism. Capitalism is said to produce conditions of “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant 2011), “entangled temporalities” (Sharma 2014); and “slow death” (Berlant 2007). Much of this scholarship builds on Foucault’s and Agamben’s theories of biopower, or the state’s power to invest in life, making life live, and to disinvest in life, letting it die. By contextualizing biopower in apparatuses of contemporary policing in the United States, this paper suggests that the binary of investment/disinvestment in these theories obscures the state’s active investment in the disposability of (some) people’s lives. Central to the process of investing in disposability are orchestrations of time that are administered by the state, conducted by police, and produce bodies for incarceration. These temporal patterns disorganize quotidian life, turning vulnerable city residents into suspects and suspects into revenue sources. I track these patterns through an archive of materials produced in the wake of recent police violence against Black and Brown people in the United States. Such materials include two documentary films by community activists, audio recordings of “stop and frisk” police stops, and government reports. Collectively, these cultural forms question the state’s technological response to this racialized violence—issuing body 84

cameras to police officers; they also oblige us to consider the underexplored yet significant temporal patterns in capitalism’s complicity with the carceral state.

Katrina Jaworski

University of South Australia 100 days of butchering: (Re)presenting the Rwandan Genocide 20 years on Theorising African genocide is undergoing a methodological crisis. This is for three reasons. First, there is a poor understanding of contexts of genocide in Africa. Second, analyses of African genocide, as important as some have been, rely on Jewish Holocaust studies model. Thirdly there is a lack of analytical attention to how epistemological frames might frame theorising African genocide. If this is the case, what impact these reasons might have on the biopolitics of representing genocides such as Rwanda? I respond to this question by examining media representations of the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Specifically, I analyse newsprint representations of the Rwandan genocide in 2014 across selected newspapers from Australia, UK, US and East Africa. I argue that the portrayal of the butchered African body is framed by orientalised understandings of the camp. This framing, I also argue, cannot account for African life itself in the context of remembering the Rwandan genocide. I conclude by considering the value of understanding biopolitics through the postcolonial lens.

Holly Randell-Moon

University of Otago Epistemic flux and sovereign regimes of Truth In this paper I critically interrogate the racial epistemologies of ‘post-truth’ discourse. Ostensibly ‘posttruth’ discourse challenges news media and political protocol that organise the presentation of news and information around demonstrable facts and reliable sources. The political success of the Trump campaign and now Administration has contested not only the legitimacy but also governmentality of news versions of Truth through the proliferation of ‘alternative facts’ creating a ‘post-truth’ discourse. In challenging the legitimacy of the mainstream media and Washington political Truth, the Administration reveals the contestability of truth but also facilitates potentially new ways of governing news media reporting and political communication. These new forms of communicating truth as well as the post-truth discourse itself can be situated within, and can be understood as extensions of, the broader racial epistemologies that underpin Western modernity and liberal democracy. Such a contextualisation draws on the work of Charles W. Mills, who argues that white people create society through a racial contract that makes them ignorant of the world they have created. I argue that it is important to situate post-truth discourse within this racial genealogy of epistemology, and the existing work of Indigenous scholars and scholars of colour such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Audra Simpson and Sylvia Wynter, precisely in order to disclose that the ongoing operation of state violence and sovereignty have always been instantiated through regimes of truth that manipulate reality. Posttruth’s communicative effects are both epistemological and governmental in that decolonial and antiracist knowledge are obscured in the rush to proliferate knowledge about this ‘new’ discourse, which in turn, centres white ways of knowing the state and its apparatuses as the locus of the knowable.

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PANEL B (ROOM 5C19) Islam and Capitalism Chair: Lewis Rarm Anoosh Soltani

University of Waikato Everyday performativity and interpellation of Muslim migrant women as skilled workers within Hamilton’s healthcare workspaces There has been a rapid rise of service economies within neoliberal and globally connected labour markets. Sociologists and feminist geographers convincingly argue that embodiment, style and personalities are key aspects for employment in contemporary service economies. Currently, New Zealand faces skill shortages within the healthcare industry. This has led to recruiting skilled foreign workers, including Muslim women in these sectors. This article draws on research that aims to understand the relationship between place, power, affect, emotion and identity for Muslim women in the Waikato region of New Zealand. In particular, I explore the ways in which different Muslim women carry out emotion work and manage their embodied performativity in order to serve healthcare customers in Hamilton. I make use of previous studies on healthcare occupations, and feminist geographers’ analyses of the ways in which employers, managers and patients take stereotypical assumptions about the embodied attributes of workers, and adjust their performativity and social interactions accordingly. Out of 34 participants, I focus on 12 interviewees who are healthcare workers in Hamilton. I argue a triple process of interpellation – attitudes by managers, customers, co-workers and Muslim peers- is at work within healthcare sectors and is re-negotiated, resisted, conformed and reinforced in everyday social interactions and practices between the Muslim women, their co-workers and patients in healthcare workplaces of Hamilton. The findings show race, the Muslim veil, and gender work as the basis for stigmatization of Muslim women within their employment spaces. Such stigmatizations makes social integration of Muslim women complicated and challenging within healthcare workplaces.

Shakira Hussein

University of Melbourne Consumer power, Islamophobia and anti-racism Middle class professional Muslims living in the west are cited as ‘good Muslims” in the good Muslim/bad Muslim binary, in large part because of their appeal as consumers. Rising prosperity among Muslim consumers around the world is cited as an incentive for companies and societies to promote themselves in ways that are attractive to this lucrative market. Halal-certified groceries, “modest fashion” and sharia-compliant financial services are cited as products that can enhance access to this promising emerging market. The loss of sales to the valuable Muslim consumer market is regularly cited as one of the ‘costs’ of Islamophobia, with reports that the French ban on burqas had led to an exodus of wealthy Arab customers from Paris to London. However, the celebration the soft power of the Muslim middle-class both excludes lower-class Muslims and plays into Islamophobic representations of Muslim consumer power as a threat which is forcing non-Muslim Australians to conform to Islamic norms or be excluded from their own society. Consumer boycotts by both Muslims and neo-nationalists have played an increasingly visible role in culture wars around Islam and Islamophobia. These include the Muslim rejection of Danish 86

products after the publication of the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons in 2005-09 and the boycott of halal-certified products by self-styled Australian “patriots” that hit the headlines in 2014. This paper discusses the prosperous Muslim consumer as an object of both fear and desire in contemporary debates over multiculturalism, immigration and Islam.

Mohammed Sulaiman

University of South Australia The Muslim Ban and the Place of Islam in a Capitalist World-System The recent rise of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant discourse in the West continues to raise many challenging questions pertaining Islam, Muslims and their place in a global, and supposedly postpolitical, world. Mainly triggered by the constant and large-scale arrival of refugees as well as the increasing presence of Muslims in the West, the anti-Muslim discourse has significantly altered the political landscape in Europe and the United States. This paper will conceptualize the relationship between Islam and capitalism as world-systems (Wallerstein 1974) in an attempt to come to terms with the meaning of Trump’s Muslim ban and the rise of anti-Muslim discourse more broadly. My contention is that the persistence of the Muslim question in Western political formations, despite the hegemony of capitalism and the erosion of the significance of particularistic identities, accentuates the failure of the capitalist world-system to accommodate Muslims as a community. Understanding the persistence of Islam in capitalism requires, first, provincializing capitalism as a culture. Therefore, this paper asks whether contemporary expressions and processes of capitalism are truly universal or whether they are better understood as the product of the West’s successful attempt at universalizing its own cultural and political formations. Finally, I suggest that understanding Muslim identity requires a counter-hegemonic conception of Islam as a special world-system (Voll 1994). This, I conclude, will help to dis-articulate the linkage between capitalism and the universal and will move closer towards a more radical and representative notion of democratic pluralism.

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PANEL C (7C09) Gendering Capitalism Chair Kendra Marston Hanna Ylöstalo

University of Tampere A battle about gender equality: affect, expertise and resistance in the strategic state In my presentation I analyze a case in which researchers, including myself, aimed for setting gender equality on the agenda of the Finnish government. The case is analyzed as an example of, firstly, the changing culture of equality policy and feminist resistance in the ‘strategic state’, a form of neoliberal governance where the economy sets the frameworks of policymaking. Secondly, the case is analyzed as an example of the chances of academic expertise to have an impact on political decision making. The data consists of the researchers’ claim for the gender impact assessment of the government programme as well as the making process of the claim; the news reportage about the claim; and politicians’ responses and the policy effects of the claim. The claim is represented as a new form of resistance. Affective control is at the heart of this resistance. The analysis makes visible how the strategic state is a difficult companion for gender equality, equality policy and feminist resistance. My presentation is based on an article written Anna Elomäki, Johanna Kantola, Anu Koivunen and myself, published in a Finnish journal Sosiologia (4/2016).

Jess Taylor

Edith Cowan University Capitalism and Womanism in Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures Theodore Melfi’s 2016 film Hidden Figures dramatizes the true stories of three Black women who worked as “computers” at NASA during the Cold War space race – Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. Depicting a period of heightened tensions between the USA and the USSR, the film is underpinned by an assertion of the superiority of capitalist democracy, especially against the totalitarian communist Russian government. Within this broader framework, however, Hidden Figures repeatedly addresses the social and institutional inequalities faced by Black women and men in this democracy, giving examples of segregated spaces as well as outright and covert hostility, to illustrate the racism that shapes Virginia (and arguably the rest of the US) at this time. As Katherine, Dorothy and Mary fight for the development of their careers in the face of this racism, the film provides a multilayered approach to reading the everyday possibilities of resistance available within a capitalist society. In order to explore these forms of resistance, this paper focuses predominantly on Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), considering how her actions throughout the film can be read in terms of a womanist prioritisation of community-building, adaptability, and “making lives better for herself and people around her however she can” (Maparyan 2012, 29-30). While Dorothy’s actions may not challenge capitalist frameworks as a whole, her actions arguably enable a reimagining of the competitive individualism deemed necessary to capitalism, privileging instead an understanding of success as relational, and as belonging to the whole community. 88

Anthea Taylor

University of Sydney Celebrity, Misogyny and Nation: Germaine Greer, The Death of the “Crocodile Hunter,” and Hate Speech In September 2006, Australia’s most iconic feminist, Germaine Greer, wrote an article in response to the death of celebrity wildlife presenter, Steve Irwin. In the Guardian piece, entitled ‘That sort of selfdelusion is what it takes to be a real Aussie larrikin’, Greer concluded: ‘The animal world has finally taken its revenge on Irwin’. For thousands of Australian readers, Greer’s public response to the untimely demise of a purported national ‘hero’ represented a symbolic assault not just on the crocodile hunter’s grieving family but on the nation itself. Following the article’s appearance, Greer’s agents – Gillon Aitken Associates, based in the UK – received copious amounts of hate mail directed towards the controversial celebrity feminist; totalling around 2000, these emails are contained in the newly acquired Greer archive at the University of Melbourne, and provide important insights into affective responses to this polarising figure. Tightly policing the boundaries of what constitutes ‘Australian-ness’ as well as mobilising problematic assumptions about the correct way of publicly doing femininity, these letters call into question Greer’s authority to speak publicly not just about this matter but about any issue at all. In so doing, these emails – which include threats of sexual violence – offer an earlier example of the kind of vitriolic, misogynistic hate speech that is now commonly directed towards vocal women in the mediasphere (especially online). Against the representation of Irwin as model Australian, Greer is dismissed not just as a ‘bad’ woman but as a ‘bad’ citizen. Placing these responses to Greer’s comments in the context of increased hate speech towards public women, this paper considers both the kind of ‘Greer’ and the kind of ‘Irwin’ being discursively constructed in these emails, and how deeply nationalistic, misogynistic discourses were deployed in these attempts to marginalise and silence Greer and to mourn and celebrate the ‘Crocodile hunter’.

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PANEL D (ROOM 7C18) Data Cultures Chair: Kevin Veale Benjamin Morgan

RMIT Cultures of data and platforms: metrics and meaning in the Australian music industries The evolution of the music commodity from the sale of physical copies to streaming songs via online digital platform services has brought about rapid structural change to practice, attitudes, and strategy in the global music industries. This interview study aims to document and examine how Australian musicians and recording industry professionals are using and thinking about digital platforms and music usage data. Uses and attitudes surrounding innovative technology create novel and interesting frameworks of value and meaning. Artistic voice, identity, and the role of commercial and cultural intermediaries in popular music are reflexively constructed and publicly performed to demonstrate and reinforce concepts such as integrity, credibility, authenticity, and cultural autonomy. The discourses surrounding these concepts shift in response to structural industry changes as well as rhetorical battles between stakeholder factions. Narratives of liberation or constraint brought about by the progression towards a cloud-based music commodity are volatile and worthy of interrogation. This presentation will reflect literature review and early results from an interview based study of artists and music industry stakeholders. It will examine how Australian (music industry) values appear to be shifting in response to the structural change brought about by the networking and datafication of listening.

Caroline Wilson-Barnao & Natalie Collie

University of Queensland Intimate listening: probing users from the inside out In 2016, the producers of We-Vibe, a sex toy, faced a class-action that alleged the device collected user data without notifying customers. In this case, the commercial strategies of enhanced data collection generated a strong disconnect for users, when it was revealed that the device was hackable and relaying user data in real-time. The data included vibration settings and duration, body temperature, even personally-identifiable email addresses. With this example in mind, we draw on interviews with communication and marketing professionals in the Australian sex industry to consider the emerging role of data collection technologies. We extend upon Kate Crawford’s work on digital labour and listening technologies to conceptualise a specific type of intimate listening taking place in the sex industry. By examining new developments in teledildonics, such as smart vibrators, we situate discourses of the sex industry within a big data context. These digital devices extend the existing commodification of sex and desire by inviting users to trade access to their bodies in return for customised and enhanced sexual experiences. We explore this idea by posing two related questions: what are the emerging digital technologies of the sex industry; and what forms of commodification are enabled by these intimate listening strategies?

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Robert Payne

American University of Paris Lossy Media: Queer Encounters With Infrastructure What would it mean to recognise that the phenomena of material restriction and degradation and infrastructural failure are not exceptions to how we consume media but form a generalised norm? Regularly – without fail, ironically – websites fail to load, GIFs stall, and online videos pause to buffer mid-stream. We squint at screens in over-lit spaces, mistype text messages on jolty public transport, and are slowed down by automatic software updates. Posing this fundamental question in an age of “seamless” and “frictionless” digital environments, often produced for more efficient accumulation of capital, this paper proposes that paying attention not just to the materiality and infrastructures of current media but also to their inherent “lossiness” can contribute to three important critical movements. First, the ways by which identities of individual media consumers and media publics are constructed as algorithmic extensions of neoliberal capital may be critiqued more thoroughly. Second, the phenomenology of encounter among users, media objects and spaces may be mapped more richly for its messy affective circuitry and not reduced to easily instrumentalised human agency. Third, the queer instability of assemblages of media materials, infrastructures and bodies can be emphasised in light of often reductively normative rhetorical accounts of current media activity and identity. Borrowing the concept of “lossy” file formats and data transfer from computer science and adapting it for this purpose, this paper’s aim is to think about how to recuperate the contingent, dissipated and inessential energies of media encounters.

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PANEL E (BLOCK 10, PRESENTATION D) Environments and Environmentalism Chair: Sy Taffel Zoe Druick

Simon Fraser University Fly-over Environmentalism: The Political Limits of Current Spectacles of Environmental Disaster This paper investigates the emergence of long-form, spectacular environmental documentaries produced since the 1990s that represent the world as a global eco-system under threat, but often outside of any particular political or economic system of exploitation (e.g. Baraka 1992; Microcosmos 1996; Winged Migration 2001; The Blue Planet 2001; Planet Earth 2007; Life 2009; Home 2009; Babies 2010; Samsara 2011; Human Planet 2011; Earth Flight 2011; Human 2015; & Terra 2015). This set of films, produced in the UK, the US and France, constitute the most high budget and popular documentaries of the past two decades, yet to date have attracted very little scholarly attention (Roberts 1998; Wheatley 2016). To varying degrees, all of these films and shows use virtuosic and hightech nature cinematography, ethnographic images of people and anthropomorphised animals from the global south, and distressing images of the ravages of industrialization to convey anxiety about looming environmental catastrophe. In this paper, I situate the phenomenon of these global documentaries in relation to the history of both imperial capitalism and colonial expedition cinema. I argue that the god’s eye perspective of such films and their success in the global TV and cinema markets, complicates any critical perspective they may seem to provide on capitalism’s expansionist tendencies and extractivist mode of value production. Instead, the films layer the exhilarating proprioceptive aesthetics (Richmond) of the flyover genre over the sublime representational systems and immersive aesthetic environments of Western Imperialism since the 19th century, including the panorama, the expedition film, the World’s Fair, aerial photography, and the phantom ride (Giblett 2008; Griffiths 2013; Halpern 2014; Lutz & Collins 1993; Ruoff 2006; Staples 2006; Turner 2006; Virilio 1989). The result, I argue, is a new body genre, which engages spectators at a physiological level with the exhilarating promise of omniscience, and losing critical perspective along the way. I argue that these heartfelt films and shows about the Anthropocene thus provide an inadequate cognitive map from which to determine political actions to be taken to resist capitalism and prevent environmental disaster (Jameson 1991; Moore 2016; Toscano & Kinkle 2015).

Lisa Vonk

Massey University Paying Attention to Human Waste: Circular Economies in an Information Age As popular awareness of the global waste crisis rises, the discourse of a circular economy, which advocates for materials being kept in circulation for as long as possible in order to extract maximum value, as opposed to a linear economy of single use and disposal, is nascent. Unsurprisingly then, Apple, arguably the "face" of the current formations of capital, have been eager adopters of circular economy business practises and discourses. In late 2016, they launched Liam, an automated robot that dismantles used iPhones and separates their parts, purportedly as part of a larger strategy to 92

"build supply chains that continue to reduce, and even make positive, Apple's environmental impact on the world" (Rujanavech et al 7: Apple White Paper). On Earth Day 2017 they released a series of comic video's detailing their journey to sustainability. Superficially, such a move might suggest a tempering of the material excess of capitalism, a maturation of discourses of immateriality oft associated with economies that deal in information and attention catalysed by the disruption caused by growing public awareness of the ecological devastation wrought by electronic waste. Of course, reality is not so simple, and Liam's environmental credentials far from established. This presentation will explore this relationship between the capitalist formations organised around attention and information, and discourses of economic circularity. Ultimately, I argue that even if companies such as Apple were to achieve true material circularity, waste would still be inherent. The cultural formations that scaffold, and are scaffolded by, "networked" capitalism, are incompatible with the human brain; what is wasted in such economies, that is, is human.

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PANEL F (ROOM ESS) You better work: Reality TV, the self, and neoliberal labour Chair: Chloe Banks Anita Brady

Victoria University of Wellington Caitlyn Jenner, Reality Television and Neo-Liberal Projects of Self When Caitlyn Jenner reaffirmed her Republican allegiance in the wake of the election of Donald Trump, there was a palpable sense of exasperation amongst trans advocates. From the moment Bruce Jenner first announced to Diane Sawyer that she was both a woman and a conservative Christian Republican, the uncomfortable politics of the first transperson with a global media platform has repeatedly shaded celebration of this unprecedented moment of visibility. Nowhere, perhaps, is this more apparent than in the reality series I Am Cait, whose two seasons followed Caitlyn Jenner’s early experience of public life. The series’ dominant familial group are a group of trans activists and academics that the series gathers in order to teach the most famous trans person on the planet what it means to belong to the community she now wishes to represent. What this paper considers is whether the “education” of Caitlyn Jenner that becomes the primary narrative of the text reaffirms or troubles the neoliberal ideology at the core of her conservatism. In order to explore this, I examine the critiques mobilised against Jenner in I Am Cait, Jenner’s framing of trans politics as a politics of “self-help,” and the intersection of the text’s corrective pedagogies with the reality television context in which they take place. Through this, this paper will ask whether the leftist trans politics visibly mobilised in I Am Cait functions as neo-liberal “makeover” politics that seek to transform Jenner into a productive queer citizen

James Hall

Edith Cowan University The Social Contract, Neo-Liberalism and Survivor Since it commenced broadcasting on CBS in 2000, the television show Survivor has taken a unique place within the reality television genre. In many respects the show is a pioneer of the format and yet it differs from its contemporaries in that it empowers contestants to determine the final outcome, rather than allowing viewer interaction. This paper examines the changing dynamics of social and inter-personal relationships over 35 series of Survivor, focussing on the fluidity of the social contract and the increasing acceptance of neoliberal values within the show’s gameplay. Given that victory is granted through fellow contestants (the winner is voted for by a jury of eliminated castaways rather than a viewer poll), “jury-management” has become a central part of player strategy. From the initial few seasons a clear social contract emerged, built on trust and loyalty, it was generally regarded as the “acceptable” form of gameplay. However over the past ten seasons a distinct shift in the social contract between players has emerged, a shift away from loyalty, trust and authenticity and towards a model of gameplay where rational self-interest becomes not only an acceptable strategy for gameplay, but the ideal gameplay. Whilst this shift highlights the acceptability of neoliberal values in social interactions with financial benefits, it is also emerges as the US economy starts to recover from global financial crisis, where notions of the “winner take all society” (Cook & Frank, 1995) become feasible again for the lower and middle classes. 94

Jodi McAlister

University of Tasmania #BudgetBachie and #DirtyStreetPie: Consuming Romance in The Bachelor/ette Australia In Consuming the Romantic Utopia, Eva Illouz argues that as romantic love evolved in a secular society, it “took on the properties of ritual,” by drawing on utopian notions of “abundance, individualism, and creative self-fulfilment” which are then “experienced through the cyclical performance of rituals of consumption” (1997, 8). While in some senses love is divorced from capitalist culture – a romantic partner is unique and irreplaceable, unlike a business partner (Illouz 1997, 2-3) – our notions of romance and the love story in Western culture are often filtered through distinctly capitalist rituals. In the second season of The Bachelor Australia (2014), contestant Laurina Fleure made headlines when she berated Bachelor Blake Garvey for taking her on a date which did not appropriately follow the ritual: “everyone else gets Ferraris, super yachts and private jets, and I get a dirty street pie,” she memorably said, revealing the ways in which ritual is inscribed into romance in this particular cultural artefact. This paper will discuss the tense relationship between capitalist ritual and romantic love in The Bachelor/ette Australia, and the way it is negotiated in the show and by viewers. In addition to the #DirtyStreetPie incident, it will focus on the third season of The Bachelor Australia (2015), which became known, via Rosie Waterland’s recaps, as the #BudgetBachie season. By analysing Waterland’s recaps, other recaps, and social media reactions to the show, this paper will unpack the ways in which faultlines between ritual and romance are exposed, discussed, and negotiated in cultural discourse.

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PANEL G (BLOCK 10, PRESENTATION E) Creative Economies Chair: Sarah Elsie Baker Susan Luckman

University of South Australia “The devil is in the level”: Social inclusion, identity and power in Australia’s Cultural and Creative Industries The issue the lack of social diversity within Australia’s cultural and creative industries (CCIs) has recently been subject to high profile public debate (DuPlessis, O’Sullivan & Rentschler 2014; FECCA 2016; PwC 2016; Screen Australia 2016). Employing both a qualitative examination of key scholarly and sectoral documents, and a quantitative analysis of Australian 2011 census data, this presentation scopes the current state of play around social inclusion, identity and power in Australia’s CCIs. The researchers identified the socio-demographic profile of workers in the CCIs, using multiple diversity attributes such as gender, age, and socio-economic status. Results identified that the ‘devil is in the level’; that is, that while there is often gender parity at the sectoral level (‘Music and Performing Arts’, ‘Film, TV & Radio’, and ‘Publishing’), once you drill down further into specific roles, clear inequalities start to emerge between ‘creative’ versus support, administration and management positions (‘suits’). As has been found elsewhere especially in the United Kingdom (Conor, Gill and Taylor 2015; Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2011; Leung et al. 2015; O’Brien et al.; Wreyford 2015), we argue that this lack of diversity at the level of creative and creative gatekeeping positions is a key contributing factor to the sector’s identified inequalities as often informal network-oriented recruitment practices operate as barriers to more inclusive employment.

Kathleen Kuehn

Victoria University of Wellington Branding the Brewster: Negotiating Authenticity and Gender in the Era of Craft Capitalism This paper explores the gendered politics of authenticity in craft beer work. Craft culture is often celebrated as a self-entrepreneurial, meritocratic space outside the institutional structures of patriarchy and consumer capitalism. In-depth interviews with 17 female craft beer brewers from around New Zealand largely confirmed this perception of the cultural work of craft brewing. Yet at the same time, participant acknowledged that the manual labour of beer production is now subordinate to the promotional culture that sustains it. To ‘make it’ in today’s craft beer industry requires a stable and “authentic” brand identity – a practice that adheres to, and thus situates craft work within, the wider logics of contemporary capitalism. While most of the women I interviewed insisted gender is irrelevant to their work and success, most of them felt compelled to write gender out of their brand identity. On the one hand, NZ’s women brewers aim to produce an authentic ‘craft’ product true to themselves; on the other hand, they also claimed to have intentionally developed gender-neutral brand identities that would not exclude their largest consumer market – men. These tensions should not necessarily be read as yet another example of post-feminist discourse. Rather, the New Zealand Brewster community feel they must negotiate “gendered authenticity” as a strategic response to ‘craft capitalism’s’ encroaching threats to worker autonomy – that is, a necessary tradeoff to ‘doing what you love’. 96

Tai Neilson

Macquarie University Putting Unions Back in Digital Labour With few exceptions, discussion of unions is absent from Cultural Studies approaches to the exploitation of internet users or changing conditions for wage workers precipitated by digital media. The lack of attention to unions is, in large part, due to the dual influences of information society theories and Marxist autonomism. Information society approaches stretching from Bell (1976) to Castells (2000) consider class conflict a historical remnant of industrial society and, accordingly, relegate working class institutions and movements to the past. Autonomist Marxists minimize the role of trade unions for different reasons; Castoriadis (1955), Tronti (1966), Federici (1975), Negri and Hart (2000), and others reject centralised forms of organisation, including trade unions and political parties and develop expanded conceptions of class composition. Despite their differences, both approaches reject trade unions as significant actors in contemporary capitalism or promising institutions for working class organisation. Notwithstanding pertinent criticism of existing trade unions, the uniform or principled rejection of unions is counterproductive (Alcoff and Alcoff, 2015). Rather, I describe recent union campaigns in “digital first” media companies in the US to indicate how unions are organising digital workplaces and how future campaigns can adopt new organisational strategies. These examples demonstrate that young digital labourers see unions as instruments to secure a collective voice and better working conditions in precarious culture industries. Cultural Studies approaches to digital labour require renewed attention to the role of trade unions and ways in which they may be adapted to the changing demands of digital labourers.

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PANEL SIX DEC 7, 3.30-5PM PANEL A (ROOM 5C18) Capitalist Temporalities Chair: Nicholas Holm Laura Glitsos

Curtin University Decolonising capitalist time: Digital culture, memes and taking back time in the corporate workspace In this paper, I offer a way of thinking about the production of amateur digital art during the ‘workday’ as a form of resistance to the corporate time schema. The production of digital art, particularly as a process of sharing within an online community (i.e., the circulation of memes on social networking sites), can be read as a way to destabilise the capitalist construction of time as a model of efficiency measured through the relationship between human production and consumption. This approach assumes a structure in which, as Adorno remarks, an employee’s “[leisure] experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself’” (Adorno 1973: 142). For example, the construction of suitable after-work leisure activities is merely a function of the colonisation of the capitalist-time-schema which regulate ‘appropriate’ employee time use. Thus, “The paradise offered by the culture industry is the same old drudgery. Both escape and elopement are pre-designed to lead back to the starting point” of the corporate agenda (142). Therefore, perhaps ‘stealing’ time back within the bounds of the corporate workday through the production of the ‘absurdity’ of memes and amateur art can be read as a process of rejecting this capitalist model of time.

Andrew Whelan

University of Wollongong 'Ask for more time’: documentary demands and normative temporality in ‘robodebt' How bureaucracies use and structure time is a recurring theme in the literature on bureaucracy. Time is generally conceptualised as a resource to which organisations and individuals have differential access. Individuals often literally cannot afford to wait. Bureaucracies can almost always attrit any particular individual or group of individuals. There are oddities, however, about the ‘extensiveness’ of administrative temporality, which are sanitised when time is described individualistically as a resource in this way. This can be elaborated with reference to the Online Compliance Intervention (‘robodebt’), the automated debt recovery system introduced by the Department of Human Services in 2016. This 98

system matches tax records against Centrelink claimants' reported earnings. In the event of discrepancies, automated requests for documentation (e.g. payslips) are issued. A limited time frame for response is combined with requirements to submit documentation often extending back several years. Here, administrative documents subtend the invocation of a 'managing' self, who maintains an archive of files, and has steady and consistent labour market access. This is a disciplinary imposition of temporal ordering, issued via documentation and demands for further documentation. It constitutes a newly delimited present (recalibrated by the deadlines of the process itself), is expansively retrospective, and future-implicating (more bluntly: threatening). In the absence of appropriate documentation, time becomes (negative) money: debt. Or, claimants must reorient present time sufficient to amass the documents required for (time-intensive) dialogue with Centrelink. In either case, the administrative state voices a desire for normative temporalities and subjectivities through processes of bureaucratic documentation.

Wayne Hope

Auckland University of Technology Time, global capitalism and the Anthropocene: an ideology critique The general argument of this paper is that the socio-ecological and time-related features of the Anthropocene epoch are integral to global capitalism. Evidence from geology, climatology, global ecology, atmospheric chemistry, geo-chemistry and oceanography suggests that the Earth as a system has experienced a historic step-change in the relationship between the human species and the natural world. Human action and Earth dynamics can no longer be seen as disparate entities. Human inhabitants of the planet have perpetrated, and are facing, unprecedented environmental shifts (e.g. biodiversity loss, anthropogenic climate change and disruptions to the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle). In a warmer world and an impoverished biosphere multiple risks emerge; melting ice flows, rising ocean acidity, catastrophic weather events, damage to agriculture and unequal social suffering. Most centrally, the switch from an organic surface energy to an underground fossil energy has intertwined the time of the earth and the time of human history just as nature became instrumentalised as a resource for humanity. Understanding the relations of power involved here requires, theoretically, that we rethink the emergence of industrial capitalism in the historical context of a world system built upon unequal socio-ecological exchange between core and periphery regions. Since the 1980s the emergence of global capitalism has intensified the anthropogenic feed-back loops associated with climate change and reconfigured the organisational frameworks of profit extraction and socio-ecological destruction. I refer here to the transnational systems of petro-chemical capitalism, agri-business, financialisation and advertising/commodity fetishism. From a time-related perspective it can be argued that conventional representations of anthropogenic climate change, centred around meta-conceptions of anthropecenic humanity, occlude the asymmetrical entwinements of global capitalism and the Earth system. With these thoughts in mind, I will critique ideological discourses concerning climate change which thematise the global `we` over differentiations of social suffering, the inevitability of biospheric deterioration over climate justice politics and the humanity-nature binary over the clash between fossil capitalism and the ecological commons

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PANEL B (ROOM 5C19) Media Activism Chair: Pansy Duncan Kay Dickinson

Concordia University The Labour of Revolutionary Video Collectives: Defying and Complying with the Cultures of Capitalism Video-making collectives were essential to global awareness about 2011’s uprisings in the Arab world. But what is the actual work of sustaining such a collective according to an ethos of permanent revolution? How can this be tallied with the need to raise operating costs within a transnational capitalist context? To address such questions, it is necessary to grasp the changing face of work itself within the region. By the mid-1960s, countries like Syria and Egypt had, to one degree or another, nationalized most media production, incorporating it into a more universal drive for full employment in an expanded public sector. Since then, and with increased force from the 1990s onwards, bodies like the World Bank, the IMF, and USAID have done their best to demonize and break the full employment model, to open up these countries to foreign investment and labour exploitation, and to reduce the public sector. It is within this context that the “Arab Spring” emerged, spurred by video collectives dedicated to documenting the uprisings as full participants within them. How, then, do these collectives, as vulnerable and criminalized as any other within a revolutionary moment, negotiate their working conditions and economic sustainability? A delicate balance emerges. On one hand, a conviction to remaining true to particular ideals about funding and membership persists. On the other, an exploration of how to ethically monetize content, use voluntary crowd funding sites, and earn salaries to support their initiatives in hard currencies through contract work for globalized media entities.

Liz Patrick

Massey University Brands as Activists: Change Drivers or Noisy Distraction? Corporations are considered the most influential institution of modern society, and advertisements have been described as one of the most significant institutions for circulating and distributing ideological values. As consumers have become more resistant to advertising, corporations have employed a number of strategies to drive greater brand engagement. One strategy has been the increase in commodity activism, where social and political issues are packaged into marketable commodities as a means to build greater brand loyalty. More and more corporations are jumping on the commodity activism bandwagon and are attempting to balance profitability with a desire to drive societal change. By critiquing recent examples of commodity activism through the lens of neoliberalism, it is possible to consider the extent to which brands are reinforcing the neoliberal view of personal empowerment, compared with addressing the fundamental structural issues that reinforce inherent power structures 100

and inequality within modern Western society. The underlying question is whether brands, by engaging in commodity activism, are challenging or reinforcing the dominant ideology.

Sandra Jeppesen

Lakehead University Material and Immaterial Resource Mobilization: Intersectional strategies in the political economy of grassroots autonomous media. How do anti-capitalist media activists mobilize resources to ensure the resilience of anti-racist, feminist, anti-colonial, queer and trans* media projects within multi-issue radical social movements? Using an innovative Participatory Communicative Action Research methodology, six workshops or ‘radical media mixers’ were held with ninety media activists across Canada to generate research questions regarding challenges facing media activists. Ninety-one semi-structured interviews were then conducted in eleven countries on media practices related to resources, collective memory, and anti-oppression politics. This paper engages political economy and intersectionality theory to critically analyze four dimensions of media practices: generating material resources, immaterial resources, labour practices and anti-oppression resources. In generating resources, media activists focused on ethical funding opportunities consistent with project politics, and were challenged by the inaccessibility of grants. At the same time, grassroots activists were strong in cultivating immaterial resources such as networks, mentorship, skills, and emotional labour. Challenges with respect to paid vs. unpaid labour emerged as the resources of time and the space to speak are differentially available to media activists across intersectional structures of oppression such as race, colonialism and gender. Confronting this, participants developed anti-oppression media practices to mitigate inequities in resourcing, with attention to anti-capitalist and anti-oppression social movement goals. These political approaches to autonomous media resources, revealed through integrating intersectionality and political economy theories, are key to the resilience of autonomous media movements confronting neoliberal capitalism today.

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PANEL C (7C09) Affective Labour Chair: Michael Scott Hannah McCann

University of Melbourne “Doctors of Hair…Entertainers and Counsellors”: Examining Aesthetic and Affective Labour in Hair and Beauty Salons This paper examines the various forms of labour involved in work in hair and beauty salons, from the affective to the aesthetic and beyond. In addition to examining the social, affective role of salon workers, this paper considers the labour of self-presentation required of salon workers which forms part of the economy of experience. While previous studies have examined issues of “lookism” in the workplace, this paper considers the expectations placed on salon workers to appear a certain way to their clients. However, rather than taking a critical feminist perspective on the role of salon workers in maintaining and promoting beauty regimes, this paper sets these more traditional questions about the beauty industry momentarily to one side. Instead, drawing on interviews with salon workers as well as other materials relating to salon work, this paper opens up space for hearing about the front line experiences of work in the salon context. In particular—and extending upon a limited body of existing work on salons—this paper focuses on reports from salon workers that they feel like “counsellors”, while also drawing out the aesthetic and artistic aspects of work in this arena.

Alexia Cameron

RMIT Blueprints of Affect: Workers as ‘Users’ in the New Work Experience In my Doctoral research, I suggested that Melbourne’s café and bar culture is a product ‘of the moment’ where not only are customers moved by the experience, but, more pressingly, workers and employers, too, are seduced by atmosphere and vulnerable to the impact of the moment to the point where, in fact, nobody is actually in control. This on-the-spot authenticity, born out of affect, produces ‘hip’ qualities. Workers’ ‘being affected’, simultaneously blocked them from achieving their goals and from seeing a long-term trajectory, while, at the same time, powerfully seduced them with autonomy, creative expression, flexible hours, spontaneous joy, transparency and authenticity in their interactions, thinking ‘in the moment’ and ‘being present’. If workers were moved with joy, they would very likely provide better service and personally invest in the venue and their employer. Stimulated by pleasure, they were empowered to (lucratively) embody the venue’s image. In this way, workers were ‘users’—active and engaged ‘players’. To what extent does the seduction of ‘affected labourers’ contribute to widespread precariousness, more generally? Gigging, temping and casual/flexible work can now be seen as attractive ‘hip’ opportunities, many of which enable access to upper-tear professions. Is ‘hipness’ gentrifying other precarious industries through the rise of the ‘affected labourer’. Is the ‘hip’ refurbishment of ‘dirty work’ masking precarious conditions? I’ll explore such initial questions; as a consolidation of current literature from which to develop future research.

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Enda Brophy & Rafael Alarcon-Medina

Simon Fraser University Informational Returnees: Cultures of Migration, Deportation, and Class, Among the Transnational Call Centre Workforce in Mexico This paper explores the class cultures emerging among a migrant digital labour force working in call centres on the frontlines of transnational debt collection. The paper sets the context for this inquiry by describing the parallel expansion of markets for consumer credit and the call centre industry in Mexico following the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Tijuana and Mexico City over the last year, the presentation describes the growth of a bilingual and bicultural labour force south of the US-Mexican border. The communicative labour undertaken by these workers sees them migrate virtually (to take a concept offered by the sociologist A. Aneesh) over a headset to the United States to collect debt from consumers, but the intersection between labour, migration, and ICTs takes on a much deeper significance in this case. These workers tend to be drawn from the ranks of what we term “informational returnees”—Mexican nationals who grew up undocumented in the United States and have either been incarcerated and deported or have left voluntarily due to a lack of opportunities in the country for undocumented workers. For most of these informational returnees English is their mother tongue, and discrimination in Mexico due to their lack of Spanish language proficiency or cultural cues is reinforced by mediatic discourses that criminalize them. Our paper concludes by considering the mobile labouring subjectivities of these informational returnees and how they intersect with those of the indebted subjects they interact with over the phone. Based on her research among call center workers in Mexico City, Jill Anderson has described the subculture developed by the so-called “Dreamers,” young deported or returning Mexicans who migrated to the United States as children and were on the verge of having their status regularized under the Obama administration. Scholarly and journalistic accounts of the Dreamers highlight their hopes for upward mobility, with a particular emphasis on educational goals. Building on Anderson’s research, we propose that, in addition to the so-called Dreamers, the figures of the Cholo and the Paisa enable us to grasp cultural class differences among call center workers that better express the diversity of trajectories and sociocultural backgrounds among Mexican immigrants in the US.

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PANEL D (7C18) Exclusion and Inclusion of Women Chair: Ian Huffer Caroline West

George Mason University The Lean In Collection: Women, Work, and the Will to Represent In February 2014, Getty Images, the largest international stock photography agency, and the nonprofit organization Lean In, announced a new partnership that aimed to change the way women are portrayed in stock photography. The two have curated a continually growing collection, which over the past three years has amassed to over 16,000 images. Sharing the central tenet of the Lean In organization of female empowerment, the goal of the partnership is to push back against the stereotypes ascribed to both men and women arguing that historically, visual media has been a persuasive influence on the establishment and reiteration of gender stereotypes. By intervening in the distribution division of advertising imagery, Lean In hopes to change broader perceptions of the daily social roles of women and men. While the overarching ambition to challenge normative gender stereotypes that is implicit in the mission of the Lean In organization is a worthwhile goal, what is particularly interesting about this project is how is the logic of capital is expressed and reinforced as an idealized female citizenship in these photographs. Using methods of visual analysis, theoretical critiques of post-feminism, and Lauren Berlant’s concept of the “intimate public sphere”, I argue the photographs in the Lean In collection idealize a concept of female empowerment that is steeped in the neoliberal logic of capital, which confines gender citizenship in narrow economic terms. If the drive for recognition is to be truly transformative then it cannot be embedded in a capitalist structure that reproduces its oppression.

Rahna Carusi

Massey University What Does Capitalism Sound Like?: A Literary Studies Approach This talk focuses on the everyday anxiety of women as excluded subjects from the capitalist laissezfaire and, specifically, the ways in which narrative represents the sounds of this exclusion and anxiety. Understood through psychoanalysis, anxiety is affect unmoored from representation; however, the subject has to be represented in order both to be excluded and to embody or evoke anxiety. I look at two texts—different genres and time periods that frame capitalism—to compare the ways they manipulate sound to represent these anxieties within capitalist contradiction, viz. the subject who is excluded from the laissez-faire. Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1852 “The Old Nurse’s Story” emphasises the Gothic genre’s uncanny use of sound to represent women’s powerless and chaotic experience as patriarchy’s necessary, but excluded subject. Anna Smaill’s 2015 The Chimes depicts a dystopic, patriarchal, capitalist world that lost language and memory and relies upon sound for both oppression and securing privilege. In both literary texts we can hear contemporary socio-cultural anxieties borne of capitalism’s requirement for the excluded subject. In our contemporary capitalist every day, the anxiety of the excluded subject resounds in different ways, such as in the cacophony of headlines, lacking narrative anchor, that disjointedly scream of 104

chaos and desperation; or in the stillness of Jonathan Bachman’s July 9, 2016 photo of BLM protestor Ieshia Evans standing silent as 3 riot officers attack her—how in that photo’s quiet stillness the activist chants and police directives creep. 1852 or now, fiction or non-fiction, the excluded subject’s (failed) silence brings forth or makes known the laissez-faire’s unharmonious violence.

Rachel Faleatua

University of Sydney Insta Brand Me: young women’s voices on ‘authentic’ and ‘wrong’ selfies Over the past decade, self-representation by young women on social media platforms has arrested the attention of scholars in the field of gender and cultural studies. Such interest has arisen in response to the emergent hypervisiblity of young women online, along with the increased scrutiny and regulation accompanying it (Banet-Wesier, 2011). This paper engages with two key debates in this field: firstly, that ‘wrong’ types of self-representation can be used as tools for resistance (Dobson, 2014); and secondly that authenticity is a prerequisite for successful self-branding (Banet-Weiser, 2012). While these issues have been explored as an online phenomena, investigation has not yet explored their effects in the lives of young women offline. Drawing from ethnographic interviews with eight young women in Sydney, I explore the role these ideas play in their own lives offline and how this influences their own self-representational practices on Instagram. I also discuss how my participants come to frame certain selfies as ‘wrong’ and investigate the potential offline and online origins for some of these assumptions. Their thoughts on authentic self-branding via Instagram selfies and how this intersects with their offline life are also unpacked. I suggest this discussion might offer insight into the ways young women are attempting to ‘do femininity’ in what they perceive to be the ‘right’ way (Butler, 1990). I conclude by discussing the implications these findings hold for research on other social media platforms.

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PANEL E (BLOCK 10, PRESENTATION D) Vectors of Capitalism Chair: Kevin Veale Luk Swiatek

Massey University ‘Capital Creating Cultures of Peace? A Critical Analysis of Nobel Peace Laureates and their Organisations’ Activist Efforts’ For decades, a set of celebrity activists has been leaving Norway enriched by a long-deceased dynamite magnate. Nobel Peace Laureates have used their winnings – currently just over 1.2 million Australian dollars (or 1.3 million New Zealand dollars) – in various ways. Some have created organisations to further their humanitarian and political projects. This paper critically examines these underresearched but influential organisations and their activities. They are problematic in many respects, not least because they stem from the assets of a captain of capitalism once branded a “Merchant of Death”. The paper argues that the laureates’ organisations wield ‘soft power’ – that is, they attract other individuals and groups to share, and act on, the institutions’ goals (Nye 2004) – but cause political friction and often do not engender the cultures of peace that the laureates hope to foster. In examining the Nobel laureates’ organisations and their activist efforts, the paper interrogates both the economic and symbolic capital used by the laureates. It substantiates its argument with critical analyses of representative examples, including the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, and the Dalai Lama’s Foundation for Universal Responsibility. It draws on original research that will be published in The Political Economy of Celebrity Activism (ed. N. Farrell, 2018, Routledge). The paper speaks to the conference’s overarching theme, as well as the specific sub-theme of cultural resistance and activism, to which it also adds new knowledge. Additionally, it brings new, critical insights to our understanding of Nobel Peace Laureates and their activities.

Janell Watson Virginia Tech Invasive Cultures

“Culture” is one of many ways of conceptualizing human collectivities. Cultures, groups, crowds, peoples, societies, ethnicities, tribes, nations, states, and so on exhibit varying degrees of legal and institutional formality. Anne Phillips warns that any claims made on behalf of a culture should be interrogated, to ask who benefits from the cultural claim. It is also worth asking who benefits by presuming the culture-neutrality of modern claims of power and resources, grounded in legal, financial, and political institutions. These formal apparatuses impose a stability on fluctuating human relations, just as a culture creates an island of stability within a turbulent mass of humans. Collectivities undergo constant change, growing, spreading, dissipating, conquering, merging, or migrating. Frequent reconfigurations displace the fuzzy borders between culture and politics. Taking a long view of human collective formations, beginning with the great migration out of Africa, I describe turbulent population flows in terms of lines, aggregates, and narratives, as theorized by Deleuze, Guattari, and Serres. As an example of the ongoing mutations of human groupings, I consider the emergent cultural coalescence of the global bourgeoisie, whose luxury consumption of goods, services, and real estate has created a tsunami that is inundating urban landscapes around the world, eradicating existing ways 106

of life to make room for ridiculously expensive condos, restaurants, and shops. What is the cultural impact of this great migration of the highly educated and the well-paid?

Fiona Allon

University of Sydney Vampires, Zombies, Monsters and Ghosts? Cultures of financial capitalism, or what would a cultural studies of finance look like? Finance, it is generally agreed, is the dominant form of capital today. So, what constitutes a cultural studies of finance? Finance capital is commonly described via a gothic imaginary of ghosts, monsters, zombies and other specters of horror and haunting. Matt Taibbi in the magazine Rolling Stone, memorably described Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Financial derivatives have been called “Frankenstein’s monsters”, inhabiting the dark world of shadow banking where zombie mortgages and other byproducts of monstrous financial engineering also reside. Meanwhile, the horror film has become one of the most popular genres for dramatizing the material and psychic dislocations caused by the foreclosure crisis and the ghost suburbs left in its wake. These vivid representations provide one way of understanding finance, extending Marx’s own descriptions of capital as monstrous and “vampire-like”, “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” Yet this paper suggests that such spectacular representations continue to reinforce a predictable view of finance as “fictitious” and “unproductive”, and as unimaginably complex and arcane. In contrast, I would like to argue that now more than ever we need to appreciate the extent to which finance is grounded in mundane sources of value (through the securitization of mortgages, student loans, rental housing, and the payments associated with mobile phones, electricity and other basic household utilities) produced by the rhythms and routines of everyday life. Consequently, if the everyday is the central object of cultural studies (as suggested by Lawrence Grossberg), then it is imperative that cultural studies engages with finance and addresses the way its circulation of abstract capital inevitably depends on particular concrete sites and embodied subjects.

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PANEL F (ROOM ESS) Biopolitics, Biopower and Media (Part Two) Chair: Holly Randell-Moon Khairut Salum & Meshell Sturgis University of Washington My Black History: Is it in My DNA?

This presentation looks at Kendrick Lamar’s song “DNA” (2017) in conversation with Alondra Nelson’s article “DNA Ethnicity as Black Social Action?” (2013). Using our experiences as Black women who have traced our own DNA, we draw these two texts together to explore how media and biopolitics are inextricably linked. Kendrick Lamar uses Black aesthetics (i.e. language, clothing, hair) to archive how these elements concretize what Black identity means. Kendrick unveils to us a repertoire of data and documentation within the hip-hop song and accompanying music video. We discover that it is not solely the possession of a certain DNA that makes us who we are, but perhaps the acquisition and selfanalysis of the many histories and elements that constitute our identity. Using an intersectional lens Kendrick brings in symbolic representation, artistic approaches, and cinematic views to release a biopower that stems from both our words and our physical presence. The song and music video are not only an archive of Kendrick’s life and identity, but by using the language of Ebonics, Kendrick calls forth a conversation around the connections between race, DNA, and the seeming biological nature of oppression. It is not just an archive of him, but all of those who have come before him. We conclude with the provocation that while tracing one’s DNA is a form of Black action, perhaps it is Black action that makes our DNA.

Lewis Rarm

Auckland University of Technology The Strategic Apparatus of Terrorism: Re-thinking contemporary articulations of terror through Foucault Since 2014, the Islamic State (IS) have directed a global campaign of terror. While the group’s terror attacks and violent rule in Syria and Iraq has received extensive media coverage, so too has their own their own production, dissemination, and prosumption of media artefacts. Although terrorism has always been composed of texts, objects, and actions, our current techno-discursive moment affords modern terrorists a greater reach and efficacy of power than has ever been seen before. In this paper, I argue that the way terror is conducted by contemporary groups such as IS constitutes what Foucault called an apparatus or dispositif. That is, a “thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions — in short, the said as much as the unsaid” (Foucault, 1980, p. 194). Though the dispositif was not wholly elaborated on before Foucault’s death, scholars such as Agamben, Bussolini, Caborn, and Jäger have advanced his thesis, particularly in terms of developing a method of dispositive analysis. Such an analysis is composed of three discourse analyses in which one examines text, object, and action. By placing the rubric of the dispositive onto contemporary articulations of terror for analysis, we can then begin to investigate and unpack terrorism in new and novel ways. In this case, the purpose of characterising modern terrorism as an apparatus is to account for the flows, structures, and processes of subjectification of terror; it is to express and understand the multiplicitous nature of terrorism today. 108

Allen Meek

Massey University Traumatic transmission: the biopolitics of attention and immunity Videos streamed “live” on Facebook, such as the killing of Philando Castile in 2016, show how the traumatic histories of African Americans are rearticulated in the present and can be used to mobilise political action. Traumatic transmission has been associated with collective memory and identity, but media transmission also includes the ‘real time’ through which public attention is captured, monitored and directed. Bernard Steigler explains that one of the original meanings of the Latin attendere is ‘to take care.’ Steigler proposes that we need to understand the “new attentional forms” (8) made possible by digital technologies. To understand these new forms we must also situate them in their historical relation to state censorship, news media and entertainment industries. What Roberto Esposito calls the biopolitical immune system describes the ways that the modern state takes care of its citizens, protects them from harm and manages and administers public security. So the question of immunity returns us to one of the etymological origins of attention explained by Steigler: to take care of, such as attending to the needs of the sick or injured. Media technologies and information networks play a central role in the immune systems of modern societies. Shocking images capture our attention, but their effect is potentially neutralized through repetition. Less centrallycontrolled transmission of “traumatic” images has provoked renewed anxieties about highly mobile and unpredictable threats to collective security and immunity. This is evident in protest movements such as the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter but also in videos produced by terrorist organizations such as ISIS. This paper considers the impact of these contemporary “traumatic” images with reference to biopolitical conceptions of attention and immunity.

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PANEL G (BLOCK 10, PRESENTATION E) Social/Digital Media and New Formations of Chinese Diaspora (Part Two) Chair: Michael Jensen Michael Jensen

University of Canberra Chinese Language Media in Australia: Diaspora Media as a form of Active Measures Active measures refer to actions taken by a foreign government to influence the unfolding of events in the world. In a digital age, countries can engage in active measures without setting foot in the target countries through their efforts to spread information and misinformation in order to shape political discourse. It is no secret that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides financial backing to Chinese language media outlets around the world which cover local news and politics in those countries. Australia provides a useful contrast to these media outlets as the Special Broadcast Service (SBS) which is supported by the Australian government includes a Mandarin broadcast about Australian news. This research compares coverage of Australian news in the PRC supported online press. The research scrapes the text of news coverage from the Australian and PRC-backed news sites and compares them in terms of their coverage of topics, the manner in which topics are covered, and how coverage constructs identities of members of the Chinese diaspora in Australia.

Tzarina Prater

Bentley University “We mek do”: Race, Gender, Nation, and Digital Platform as Archive Whether it is the five-minute mini music documentary video, “Hakka Chinese Jamaican,” ripped from Canadian Broadcasting Television and uploaded to YouTube by Max William on May 7, 2011 or what Patricia Lange refers to as deeply personal “videos of affinity,” vlogs uploaded from the intimate space of “home” by The PhotoBlogger and Natzimas, the uploaders of these videos to YouTube, Chinese Caribbean diasporic subjects, use the platform to negotiate their relationships to constructions of racial, gendered, and national identity. This paper explores the negotiations of identity by Caribbean Chinese subjects on digital platforms, specifically their use of YouTube to create an archive, to write themselves into historical and national memory. This paper seeks to parse out what I read as challenges to discourses of national, cultural, and racial identity articulated on YouTube where technology, history, cultural production, and the concepts of “platform” converge and I am asking what languages of resistance, if any, are being produced in these spaces.

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PANEL SEVEN DEC 8, 11-12.30PM PANEL A (ROOM 5C18) Capital Inequalities Chair: Nicholas Holm Luk Swiatek

Massey University Crossing Divides through Podcasting? New Opportunities for Aural Connections, Old Limitations from Capitalist Inequalities’ Podcasting has flourished in recent years. The technology has helped break down many barriers from traditional broadcasting systems, and given individuals of different socio-economic backgrounds the opportunity to become content producers at no or little cost. It has also enabled publics in different corners of the globe to connect with each other in ways that feel intensely personal. This paper contends that podcasting is an ‘intimate bridging medium’ that generates a sense of intimacy while enabling knowledge-related and spatially-based boundaries to be crossed. This paper also contends, however, that the medium does not fulfil this intimate bridging function as effectively as it could, because of the existing inequalities in the digital public sphere. These inequalities, generated by dominant capitalist systems, cause many of the hierarchies in the realm of mass and mainstream media to be replicated in the sphere of podcasting. Political-economic tensions, as well as challenges based on status, diminish the democratic and egalitarian cultures of listening and connection that podcasting tries to help foster. Several recent examples are used to illustrate these arguments, in addition to a close analysis of the top 10 podcasts on leading podcast charts. The paper contributes to knowledge in cultural studies broadly, as well podcasting more specifically. It offers timely, critical insights into a media form that is usually treated with optimism and excitement. It also speaks to the conference theme, as well as two specific sub-themes: capitalism, culture and technology, and the political economies of online, digital and social media.

Emily Beausoleil

Massey University Shaping Sounding Chambers: How Wealth Inoculates Against Confrontation and What This Means for Social Justice Struggles Compelling evidence and arguments, though the most common tactics of Left politics, are insufficient to transform public opinion and mobilise either collective action or political change. In stark contrast to such deliberative approaches, recent scholarship from affect theory to psychology reveals that whether and how we listen to ‘others’ hinges on how these challenges interface with affective, aesthetic and epistemic ‘sounding chambers’ (Sloterdijk 2011) that inform not only what is available to perceive but one’s capacity to do so. How does power shape how one hears challenges from the 111

margins? And what does this mean for struggles to confront and transform those in positions of power who benefit from long histories and entrenched habits of inattention? This paper takes the issue of growing socioeconomic inequality in Aotearoa New Zealand to explore these questions. It examines the particular epistemic and affective challenges to listening that privilege entails, as well as the specific challenges that inequality as the focus of public critique presents, and what this means for democratic engagement and redress. When privilege affords itself the luxury of ignorance regarding the penalties on which it is based, and advantage is experienced as neutral position, attention to marginalised claims and address of deeply entrenched systems of privilege and penalty – even in minor ways – are too easily perceived as threatening. What, then, might enable listening in conditions of profound social difference and inequality?" .

Guy Redden

University of Sydney Neoliberal Ideology? Piketty, Cultural Studies and the Challenge of Inequality Century (2014) has outlined its recent resurgence, arguably helping ‘invent’ the concept in much the same way that poverty was ‘invented’ through statistical modeling in the decades preceding the emergence of socialism in the mid 19th century. An important insight is that its return has coincided with the implementation of neoliberalism approximately 35 years ago. This seems to vindicate Harvey’s view that neoliberalism effects ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in order to increase returns to capital. How can cultural studies help to make sense of the neoliberalism/inequality nexus? Following Piketty’s provocation for scholars across the humanities and social sciences to help work out the social and cultural conditions that have fostered inequality I argue that cultural studies needs to renovate ideology models to help explain how ideas have helped facilitate and legitimate the spread of competitive market relations from which those with greater economic resources and power have benefited most. As Rehmann suggests this requires seriously considering the value of Foucauldian and Marxist approaches. I draw on Hall’s non-totalizing conception of ideology to suggest that Foucauldian work on the normalization of competitive individualistic rationalities across institutions and popular culture—which is often criticized for failing to account for their provenance—be more concerned with the economic relations that influence the production of discourses. Through a range of examples I argue that practices—such as marketing, psychology, management and media production—have subtly translated economic imperatives into everyday concepts that legitimate inequality of social outcomes and delegitimate collectivism.

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PANEL B (ROOM 5C19) Affective Politics Chair: Pansy Duncan Massimiliana Urbano

University of Otago Affective Technologies and Grassroots Activism in Contemporary Italy In this paper, I employ ethnographic methods to look at grassroots activism in contemporary Italy. Through non-representational analysis, which involves participant observation and interviews in activist communities, I observe how technologies are affective and how, in relating to human and nonhuman bodies, technology can build a capacity to resist the Italian capitalist establishment. I suggest that the groups observed provide a valuable, original example of how neoliberal tendencies to use technologies for domination can be resisted. In particular, by incorporating notes and interviews from my fieldwork, I will discuss how and why some activist groups use corporate social media for political activism. Then, I will consider possible alternatives to the current dominant model of social networks, namely trusted networks (Ippolita, 2015, p. 13). I will compare and contrast the two models and discuss, with the help of concrete examples, the political and theoretical logics that specifically lead to the emergence of these different types of networks. Ultimately, I argue that trusted networks constitute an example of alternative technology that seeks to resist the neoliberal model of the corporate social web. To conclude, this paper aims to provide different examples of activist engagement with information and communication technology.

Sophie Bond

University of Otago Cultures of closure: the making and unmaking of political subjectivities In recent work, an interviewee stated that “personal attacks” had a significant effect on the nature of the action they engaged in. They remarked “if you’re already having a bad day, you don’t need much for your cup to be filled up – you’re going to go, ‘f*^# it, I’m not going to do anything’” (interview with an activist, 2014). This statement suggests the precarious nature of political subjectivities in contemporary capitalist society. Spaces of contestation and dissent have been shifting and, some argue reducing, over recent years. Described as postpolitics, depoliticisation, dedemocratisation or post-democracy, many suggest that there are a range of tactics (legislation, closed door decisionmaking, privileged expertise, lack of meaningful participatory engagement, media representations) that limit spaces of dissent, democratic engagement and debate to enable and perpetuate the neoliberal status quo. The trajectory of closure, these thinkers argue, aligns with the emergence and consolidation of neoliberalism, creating a thin culture of democratic engagement within contemporary capitalism. What is missed within these arguments is the effect such broader processes have on how subjectivities become politicised or depoliticised to act. In this paper we explore how political subjectivities are made and un-made within contemporary cultures of capitalism as activists seek to carve out spaces of democratic dissent. We argue that activists are creative in how they 113

navigate this capitalist culture of closure to create spaces of contestation, solidarity and an ethic of care.

Amy Mead

Massey University Jill Meagher’s death as spectre/spectacle: public grief and private haunting The rape and murder of 29-year-old woman Jill Meagher in Melbourne’s inner North in 2012 resonated with many Australian women as it spoke to their anxieties around violent crime in urban public spaces. As the crime garnered publicity, it provoked a kind of dull moral panic, exacerbating long held fears that the streets were unsafe for lone women after dark. I will explore the aesthetics of public, mediated grief pertaining to the case, such as the peace march that saw thirty thousand people parading down Sydney Road, Brunswick to remember Meagher. Though rather than enact change, or even ongoing discussion around women’s ‘right to the city’, the case developed a grim spectral quality. Mediated relics, such as the CCTV footage that helped convict Adrian Bayley of Meagher’s rape and murder, serve as ghostly reminders of societal mores surrounding female mobility. I wish to examine the Meagher case as both spectacle and spectre, enormously public but deeply personal, mapping itself onto both the physical and psychic landscape of urban Australian women.

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PANEL C (ROOM 7C09) Global Flows Chair: Kelly McWilliam Catherine Hoad

Macquarie University ‘Dark Parts’ and ‘Unexpected Corners’: Tracing the colonialist lexicon of ‘Global Metal’. Scholarly research on heavy metal music has increasingly expanded to address the nuances of a multisited genre, progressing from disdainful condemnations of the social worth of the music into a field which engages with the complex ways in which heavy metal music, scenes and cultures are experienced globally. However, while metal scholarship has moved away from negative depictions of heavy metal music and its fans, particularly in tracking the genre’s circulation beyond Anglo-American contexts, ‘global metal’ as an academic model perpetuates problematic discourses which establish and exotify ‘Others’. ‘Global metal’, which situates engagement with heavy metal as an encounter with progress and liberation, enables the construction of a centre/periphery model that positions the West as an originary site for the mobilisation of metallic modernity and capitalist globalisation. This paper confronts ‘global metal’ as a recent trend in Metal Music Studies, where the academic model has asserted that that ‘in every setting, metal [is] experienced as part of a complex and historically specific encounter with the forces of modernity’ (Wallach, Berger & Greene, 2011:4). I argue that the suggestion that ‘global’ scenes benefit from, or are resultant of encounters with modernity is a problematic endeavour, and one which has enabled a colonialist lexicon of ‘dark parts’, ‘unexpected corners’ and ‘unconquered territory’ to enter in to the ways in which scholarly research has characterised the ‘march’ of metal. This paper thus demonstrates the ways in which globalist modernity has been explicitly linked to coloniality within creative industries as capitalist contexts.

Roberto Strongman

University of California, Santa Barbara Creolizing Capitalism in Black Atlantic Religions This paper presents the process of creolization as it consumes, transforms and regurgitates capital within the rituals of the black Atlantic religions of Candomblé, Santería and Vodou, as these traditions make their way from the Caribbean to the large metropolitan centers of the industrialized North. My work defines Creolization as the process of cultural adaptation and survival by which subaltern populations develop a set of cultural linkages with the dominant culture in order to preserve otherwise threatened aspects of their history, customs and identity. Contrary to the popular perception of the phenomenon, this process does not involve dilution, fusion or merging. By examining these religions, it can be argued that the core of the subaltern culture remains untainted while the essence of the colonizing culture is transformed as creolization nativizes it. How does capital operate within the processes of creolization deployed by these religions? Through ethnographic interviews, analysis of diasporic religious rituals, close reading of novels and discussion of Yoruba inspired popular music, I argue that black Atlantic religions productively appropriate capital just as they did the syncretized Roman Catholic saints during the colonial period. These religions do 115

not resist capital; they co-opt it and thereby provide us with a unique method of cultural survival worth discussing within “Cultures of Capitalism.”

Lewis Rarm

Auckland University of Technology Excesses of Conduct: Cultural Biopolitics in IS Media For the last three years, the group known as the Islamic State (IS) have skilfully coordinated a successful media apparatus which helped to fortify a caliphate. The reach of IS’s media has both local and global concentrations and includes an uptake of one-to-many (videos, magazines, songs) and many-to-many media (blogs, social networks). While there has been a focus on the representative messages of IS media as propaganda, little work has been done on the production and regulation of internal citizens and external supporters’ daily conduct in terms of processes of subjectification; less has been done on IS’s deployment of power. In light of an analysis of IS videos such as End of SykesPicot (2014) and No Respite (2015), I argue that IS media exerts biopower in that it teaches who to “make live” or “let die” (Foucault, 2003, p. 241). Here, biopolitical deployment must be considered beyond a strictly scientific sense: IS do not rely on the scientific disciplines to capture, analyse, manage, foster, and exclude life. Instead, biopower in IS media refers rather to a pedagogy of cultural biopolitics: IS media teaches subjects what kind of daily conduct is required for the pursuit of salvation. By linking biopower with Foucault’s concept of governmentality, we can then begin to delineate how IS subjects are biopolitically cultivated through material and media apparatuses.

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PANEL D (ROOM 7C18) Postcolonial Discourse and Governance Chair: Holly Randell-Moon Lisa Slater

University of Wollongong The Anti-festival: KALACC, vital politics and the artful business of making Kardiya hear and feel differently The Kimberley Aboriginal Law & Culture Centre (KALACC) festival is an uncompromising event. For the last thirty years, KALACC has advocated for culturally based self-determination for Kimberley Aboriginal people, and supports Traditional Owners to keep their culture strong. The event is uncompromisingly driven by Traditional Owners’ knowledge and histories, on their terms and on country; it is not easily (if at all) translatable for Kardiya (non-Indigenous people). Theirs is a vital politics. In 2014, funding bodies were invited to the festival for a five-day cultural immersion and knowledge program. They represented agencies that have significant influence in the Kimberley region or more generally Aboriginal Australian: funding bodies, resource industry or government agencies. KALACC ran the ‘philanthropic tour’ as a fund raising and advocacy exercise. In this paper, I will discuss what Kardiya recognised, how they were affected and if the event reframed their perceptions of remote Aboriginal Australia. It is only too clear that they were willing to listen, but what could they hear? I argue that KALACC’s political strategy is one of ‘untranstability’: it is not about recognition or reconciliation, which continue to operate on settler colonial terms. But rather it is an invitation for nonrecognition – multiplicity. I examine the philanthropic tour as working to intervene in, activate and expand the affective capacities of Kardiya. To feel, see and hear something other than white worry and the need for intervention. My key question is, what happens when you throw well-meaning, settler Australians into imponderable spaces?

Jill Kramer

Macquarie University Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory? Ten years ago, the Australian settler-colonial state launched the Northern Territory Emergency Response in seventy-three targeted Aboriginal communities. Against the backdrop of headlines such as ‘Martial Law’ (Adlam & Gartress 2007, p. 1), it suspended the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 and compulsorily acquired Aboriginal land. It also deployed the police, military and Government Business Managers to enforce a biopolitical arsenal that aimed to ‘normalise’ targeted communities and assimilate them into the neoliberal marketplace. Since 2007, this arsenal has been adapted, augmented and reinforced by consecutive Governments. With each iteration, it has undergone scrutiny. Indigenous testimonies, research reports and advocacy organisations have repeatedly exposed the racialised violence reproduced by the settler-colonial state. In spite of this evidence, however, the Emergency Response continues. It is now known as the Stronger Futures policy. In this paper, I ask: how are capitalist, legal and political discourses mobilised in order to justify and legitimate the continuation this policy? Drawing on the work of Denise Ferreira da Silva (2007) and Cheryl Harris (1993), I explore the reinstatement of the Racial Discrimination Act and the most recent iteration of 117

the Stronger Futures policy in order to track the ways in which the analytics of raciality consistently reconstruct racial violence as necessary.

Jo Smith and Jessica Hutchings Victoria University of Wellington A Cultural Politics of Māori Food TV

Arguments about the Rights of Nature have prevailed in Aotearoa/New Zealand with the 2014 Te Urewera Act and the 2017 Whanganui River Act assigning “personhood” to a once titled “Conservation Park” and a wounded waterway. As Pita Sharples, then Minister of Māori Affairs in 2014, argued, “[t]he [Tūhoe] settlement is a profound alternative to the human presumption of sovereignty over the natural world” (Rosseau, 2016, para. 6). This legal revolution not only represents the increasing recognition of Māori ways of thinking and doing in the life of a settler colonial nation, it shifts the ways of relating to the natural world and represents an opportunity to rethink Western cultural and economic norms. Māori media organizations such as Māori Television have helped enhance the recognition of Māori ways of understanding landscapes and natural resources. This paper argues that communicating diverse Māori values and worldviews still remains a key priority in post-settlement era Aotearoa. We discuss Food TV on Māori Television as vehicles for generating new discursive possibilities that open out prevailing understandings of place—and peoples—within this nation. Based on a “ki uta ki tai” methodology (from the mountains to the sea) we offer a mode of media analysis that shines light on long standing Indigenous politico-cultural economies based on the indivisible relationship between lands, waters and peoples.

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PANEL E (BLOCK 10, PRESENTATION D) Consuming Authenticity and Popularity Chair: Jodi McAlister Rebecca Trelease

Auckland University of Technology Selling high-art in the low-art format of America’s Next Top Model Adorno’s description of the culture industry relies on a ‘high-art’ or ‘low-art’ dichotomy (Adorno & Rabinbach, Culture Industry Reconsidered, 1975, p. 12). An anomaly of this is America’s Next Top Model (2003 - ), merging mediums of high-art fashion and photography within the popular culture of the reality television genre. Previous research into the ANTM format often regards race (see: Thompson, 2010, Hasinoff, 2008) or labour (see: Ouellette, 2016). This research, however, will critically examine the intersection of culture and capitalism embodied by the ANTM format. As Dyer argues, ‘an art rooted in bodily effect can give us a knowledge of the body that other art cannot’ (Dyer, 1985, p. n.p.). The format of ANTM transfers knowledge and encourages the audience to view the human body - and their own - as a high-art form. ANTM presents fine-art couched within an accessible reality television format, encapsulating high-art critique within low-art popular culture. This research will unpack the show format reinforcing Adorno’s position that popular media lends itself to the expected and repetition, for ‘the spectator feels on safe ground all the time’ (Adorno, 1954, p. 216). Situated within this familiar framework, I then deconstruct the high-art informative aspect of the text, as host and former supermodel Tyra Banks educates both participants and the audience in fashion and photography. I then conclude by demonstrating how audience application of this knowledge during the ‘judging panel’ reveals the ultimate pleasure of ANTM, as the viewer moves from popular art consumer to fine art critic.

Georgia Munro-Cook

University of Sydney Sporting Cultures/Capital Cultures: Women’s Basketball and the Price of Commercial Failure Basketball is big business in the United States. As one of the “Big Four” American sports, the National Basketball Association (NBA) dominates the cultural landscape and generates huge profits for owners and players. However, the WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Association) has not been accorded the same position and respect within American society, and instead has been viewed as a resounding commercial failure. Even NBA commissioner Adam Silver has commented that he was disappointed that the WNBA had not “broken through” to a greater extent. The WNBA has had to counter deeprooted resentments towards women’s encroachment on the male sporting space, and to counter this has traditionally relied on a “heterosexy” presentation of women, which emphasises beauty, motherhood, and heterosexual femininity. This paper will explore the meaning of “commercial failure” within this context, addressing the disproportionate level of scorn the WNBA receives. It will also examine the effectiveness of promoting femininity to challenge this perceived failure and whether these tactics have changed over time, particularly in relation to the entrance of women such as Brittney Griner into the league, who directly challenged the privileging of normative heterosexuality in the way the league marketed itself and, in turn, definitions of “commercial success”. 119

Mark Gibson

Monash University The Persistence of ‘the Fringe’ – ‘Post-anti-romanticism’ and Cultural Policy Over the last few decades, the idea of the ‘fringe’ or ‘margins’ in cultural production has been become an object of considerable suspicion. At the level of scholarly theory, a formidable array of arguments has been ranged against romantic claims to ‘authenticity’ or ‘originality’ on which it has generally been based. The idea of the ‘fringe’ has also been brought into question by changes to distribution systems, which has disrupted the structure of relations between the mainstream and the margins. Finally, it has been affected by a loss of cultural and political charge between commercial and non-commercial forms of cultural production – as small cottage production has been conceptualised as part of the ‘creative industries’ and as major profits in the mainstream have collapsed. Against this background, the paper argues that the idea of ‘the fringe’ has nevertheless remained surprisingly durable. The paper draws on examples from a three-year project ‘Fringe to Famous’, examining moments of crossover between small-scale creative production and the ‘mainstream’ in Sydney and Melbourne from the 1970s. In reviewing the interviews undertaken for the project, we have been struck by how persistent the idea of the fringe remains – and how important in organising relations of creatives to their practices, their audiences and their peers. The paper examines this persistence of the fringe, suggesting that we respond to it with a ‘post-anti-romantic’ approach to cultural policy.

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PANEL F (ROOM Block 10, Presentation E) Music + Activism Chair: Ian Huffer Natalya Lusty

University of Sydney From Pussy Riot to the Pussyhat Project: The Resurgence of Radical Feminist Activism The arrival of Pussy Riot and more recently, the Pussyhat movement has seen a global resurgence in grassroots forms of feminist activism. The recent publication of Jenna Crispin’s book manifesto, Why I am Not a Feminist, has castigated popular feminism’s obsession with the branding of empowerment as a form of entrepreneurial individualism and self-improvement goal, in the process pushing a radical feminist agenda to the forefront of media discussions of feminism. Are we witnessing a repudiation of popular forms of commodified and neoliberal feminism and a resurgence of older ideas of solidarity, anti-capitalism, and grassroots activism newly framed within a global, mediated feminist movement? This paper examines the recent resurgence of radical forms of grassroots feminism in the context of their connection to earlier forms of feminism, including the Riot Grrrl movement’s earlier promotion of everyday forms of resistance and collective modes of agency.

Linda Daniela Villegas

University of Sydney Feminist Mexican Hip-Hop: constructing alternative economic sorority networks This presentation is part of the results of my PhD thesis titled: Feminist Activism in Hip-Hop Culture in Mexico: Batallones Femeninos and Mare Advertencia Lirika. Both indigenous rapper Mare from Oaxaca and the female collective Batallones from the border town of Ciudad Juárez produce their music, workshops and travel across Mexican territory through alternative economic practices and sorority networks. I argue that they are configuring sorority economy networks among women through autonomy and self-government practices, such as selling their own music production hand in hand, stickers, t-shirts; skill-sharing, and in other occasions through trading without money, or trueque as it is more common know in the region. In the, case of Batallones they follow the autonomy model of the Zapatista Movement and in the case of Mare, the communitarian of indigenous groups in Oaxaca. It’s a currency of community among women that allows them to create and disseminate their music committed with the ‘antifeminicide’ movement, the protection of the land and left wing social movements. Although they use social media and music streaming platforms such as SoundCloud and YouTube their main interaction and music distribution is via face to face activities such as the selling of their own crafted music production and the sharing of knowledges in their workshops. They are contesting the mainstream hip-hop music industry and the neoliberalist and patriarchal economic system, through an alternative model to produce, create, sell and exchange their feminist hip-hop and strengthen their communities.

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Panizza Allmark

Edith Cowan University Dangerous Women: Post feminism, Pop Music, Neoliberalism and international concert tours 20072017. The notion and the celebration of the female body is a site of individual power and pleasure is central to the postfeminist messages in popular media. In particular, over the last ten years, the female empowerment messages of being self-assured, confident and the body experienced as a site of power is apparent in the performances of a range of U.S. mainstream pop music artists, such as Beyoncé, Rihanna, Nicky Minaj, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Meghan Trainer. But, the female confidence expressed by these top 40 artists has also garnered criticism from conservative areas. Significantly, in World Tours the American based feminist performances are considered a cultural clash and in conflict with alternative (albeit traditional) views on how the female body should be presented. Notably, at the conclusion of Ariana Grande’s ‘Dangerous Woman’ concert in Manchester, on May 22nd 2017, a bomb was exploded which killed twenty-two people, many who were girls and women. The genderbased component of the attack was evident, as Ariana’s fan base is predominantly pre-teens and adolescent females. Ariana’s sexual empowerment message and her playful femininity was seen as a threat to ISIS who have claimed responsibility for the attack. In this paper, I examine female music artists who have been targets of hostility due to the feminist messages they espouse. In particular I will be considering the last ten years in which feminism is evident in the top 40 popular music lists, more than any other time period. On world tours, female artists have been banned or censored. For example, Beyoncé’s 2009 planned concert in Malaysia was considered ‘immoral’, due to her dance routine and dress style, which was seen as ‘too skimpy’. This paper explores the issue of performance, sexuality, femininity and cultural values.

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PANEL EIGHT DEC 8, 1.30-3PM PANEL A (ROOM 5C18) After Capitalism Chair: Kay Dickinson Hanna Ylöstalo & Lisa Adkins

University of Tampere Experimenting with Wellbeing: UBI, Immaterial Labour and the Production of Uncertainty This paper is concerned with UBI (Universal Basic Income) and especially with the ongoing UBI experiment in Finland. This trial has gleaned praise from progressives around the world, not least because of its apparent break from the compulsions of workfarism. In this paper we stress, however, that the Finnish UBI experiment must be understood as part of a broad programme of government reform and especially as part of strategies aimed at the restructuring of labour. We elaborate how the UBI experiment is a behaviourist intervention designed to enhance the wellbeing of unemployed populations at a time in which productivity increasingly turns around wellbeing, that is, at a time in which wellbeing is increasingly defined as a productive, value producing, capacity. In this context we suggest UBI must be understood as a policy intervention which forms part of a broader strategy of the restructuring of labour and the emergence of new notions of productivity.

Sarah Baker

Media Design School Post-work futures and full automation: towards a feminist design methodology Among business leaders, government officials and academics there is a general consensus that new technological developments such as artificial intelligence, robotics and the internet of things have the potential to ‘take our jobs’. Rather than resisting and bemoaning this radical shift, theorists such as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2016) have argued that full automation, universal basic income, and future thinking, should be demanded in order to challenge neo-liberal hegemony. Helen Hester (2016) has gone on to consider the limits and potentials of this manifesto in regard to the automation of reproductive labour. In this paper, I take this work as a starting point and consider the significant burden that is left at the designer’s door in the post-work/post-capitalist imaginary. I explore the changes that would need to be made to design methods and tools: technologies that are themselves part of the history of industrial capitalism. Drawing on feminist theory and emergent design practice, I develop an intersectional feminist design methodology; without which I argue that an emancipatory post-work politics cannot be realised.

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Briohny Walker & Anna Carlson

University of Tasmania Free Universities and radical reading groups: community self-education as anti-capitalist culture In this presentation, members of Brisbane Free University, Right to the City Brisbane and Queering Health Hobart will discuss the role of community self-education in the creation of anti-capitalist culture/s. Brisbane Free University is a public education project that challenges the corporatisation of universities by providing free lectures in public spaces, co-ordinating a radical reading group and participating in other social movements. Right to the City Brisbane is an assemblage of activists, artists and educators working to disrupt, unsettle and reimagine the colonial, capitalist city. Queering Health Hobart is a reading group consisting mostly of health care workers and students who are interrogating the pressures of institutional “efficiency” on the goal of patient centred care, pursuing approaches to health and wellbeing that centre difference. Together, these groups ask what it means to take seriously the transformative potential of education in the creation of new cultures, while simultaneously acknowledging the challenges capitalism poses to community-based projects. We consider what it means for a community self-education project to be anti-capitalist in form as well as content, discussing pre-figurative tactics, feminist care ethics and the centring of friendship, alongside alternative curriculum development, decolonisation and queer pedagogies. Drawing on insights from queer theory, Indigenous theory, whiteness studies and critical health discourse, we use this session to ask, in the words of geographer Peter Marcuse, “what ought to happen next, and what needs to happen now to make what ought to happen possible?”

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PANEL B (ROOM 5C19) Creative Labour Chair: Kendra Marston Michel Rubin

Monash Wellington Ulrich Seidl’s Cinema of Cruelty: nonprofessional performance, labour and exploitation Over the last few decades the Austrian auteur Ulrich Seidl has directed a very particular brand of cinematic cruelty. His hybridised blend of documentary and fiction has never failed to court a high degree of controversy. This is especially the case when it comes to his methods of working with nonprofessional actors. Indeed, the director is often accused of exploiting and objectifying amateur actors who come from marginalised communities and lower socio-economic backgrounds. This paper will argue that Seidl’s films in fact advance such a reading: his controversial methods of cruelty are mobilised to render his own films complicit in the contemporary circuits of labour. While the films thematically concern a critique of labour, exploitation and power in a globalised neoliberal economy, these themes are enacted within the filmmaking process – specifically the aestheticized spectacles of degradation, training and humiliation. I argue that Seidl does not attempt to distance himself from the uneven power dynamics and exploitation portrayed in the narratives, but rather unveils the processes of labour and economies involved in performance. These issues will be raised specifically by analysing Import/Export (2007), a film which concerns poverty, and the migration of labour across East and West borders in contemporary Europe. In approaching this film, this paper will ask whether this autocritique indeed justifies the extreme levels the filmmaker goes? How the spectator confronts such performances? And whether they are complicit in the exploitation?

Claire Henry

Massey University Straying and Slowing with Kelly Reichardt ‘The rhythm of things seems to me so much dictated. It all just seems everything is getting faster. Faster, faster, faster – we all want things faster. I guess there is a part of me that likes the pull against that.’ – Kelly Reichardt Across her six feature films since 1994, American director Kelly Reichardt has taken time as a mechanism to reveal and question social and economic structures—both in the films’ aesthetics and themes, and in her resistance to industrial models and pace of production. Within and between Certain Women (2016), Night Moves (2013), Meek's Cutoff (2010),Wendy and Lucy (2008), Old Joy (2006) and River of Grass (1994), Reichardt puts a drag on capitalist temporal order, slowing and stretching time to make its cultural operations visible. She uses temporal strategies—particularly those associated with slow cinema—to convey experiences of difference (and difference of experience) along class lines in contemporary and historical contexts in American society. Reichardt’s cinema reflects on how society sloughs its outsiders by slowing us down to contemplate those left behind/outside these systems. From a production perspective, she operates as an industry ‘stray’ working to her own schedules, for example, in taking long periods for location scouting and editing, as well as gaps between projects. This paper draws on frameworks of slow cinema and 125

conceptualisations of the ‘stray’ to explore how specific strategies of cultural critique are effected by her films and filmmaking practices.

Pat O’Grady

Macquarie University The Art of Creativity: Pop Music Production Process, Technology and Legitimacy In this paper, I consider the term ‘creativity’ as part of a political discourse that shapes hierarchies of value around both cultural texts and the practices associated with their production. Across a number of academic disciplines, ‘creativity’ has been used to understand the processes associated with the production of texts and objects. In his work, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1988) proposes the ‘systems model’ in order to argue creativity is a culturally informed cognitive activity. More recently, Phillip McIntyre (2012) synthesises the systems model with cultural production to understand creativity within media practice. I examine how cultural production is also useful for understanding the political economy of the term creativity within industrial contexts. More specifically, I consider the ways in which the term is used within the discursive space of pop music production. In this space, creativity has a complex relationship with technology. The use of particular technologies is argued to be at odds with ‘creativity.’ Here, it is used to delegitimize the use of particular technologies within production. Such practices can be understood as political plays made to inscribe hierarchies of value around music and musicians.

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PANEL C (7C09) Capitalism and Childhood Chair: Teresa Housel Jay Daniel Thompson

University of Melbourne Haunting sex: Spectres of commodity capitalism in anti-“media sexualisation of childhood’” discourses This paper will address the anti-‘sexualisation of childhood’ discourses that have flourished over the last decade or so. These discourses have stemmed from older critiques of the commodification of youth, though this fact has often (and perhaps understandably) been overlooked. I write ‘understandably’ because within anti-sexualisation discourses, commodity capitalism has had a spectral presence: it has hovered around the edges, ghost-like, but has seldom been fully articulated. Firstly, I argue that this failure to engage in any meaningful way with the issue of capitalism has had negative ramifications for anti-sexualisation discourses. Within these discourses, the term ‘sexualisation’ itself has come to designate the very thing that children are perpetually threatened by, and that they must always be protected (by their parents) from. Issues such as commodification and gender have been effectively disregarded. I move on to argue that a stronger focus on the gendered nature of commodity capitalism will help us move beyond the antiquated and unhelpful stereotypes of childhood passivity, as well as of the inherent toxicity of ‘sex’ and ‘sexualisation’; and achieve a more nuanced understanding of the dangers and opportunities for empowerment that children face in contemporary culture. The paper will focus primarily on anti-sexualisation discourses that have circulated in Australia. The paper engages with existing critiques of ‘sexualisation of youth’ controversies, as well as with Derrida’s work on spectrality.

Rachel Cole

University of Sydney Australian Media Classification: Modern predicaments of governance In classifying media, the Australian Classification Board and Branch (ACB) are organisations that must consider the public good of media regulation in an environment increasingly driven by market demands of the media industry and consumers. Decision-making therefore represents junctions between consumer needs and concerns for modern citizens: separating adult content in relation to categories for minors, and providing guidance for audiences. This process must account for the often disparate expectations of policy and social anxieties regarding media, and as such, the ACB’s decisions and processes reach beyond patterns of consumption to inform everyday practices in how we watch and interact with media content. This paper will reflect on ethnographic work conducted with ACB staff this year to give insight into modern governance through cultural policy and media regulation. The ACB’s practices enact Federal and State legislation with a uniform classification code to interpret media for the nation. The 127

opportunities and problems in being an independent statutory body tied to legislation in their decision-making will be explored, as well as the translation of issues within changing and convergent media environments. The contemporary concerns of the Australian public undoubtedly fall around access to content provided by new media platforms and regulation must balance these against the potential opportunities posed by new media (Lumby and Crawford, 2011 p5). This paper will examine the ACB’s approach in adapting to these changes, as they potentially transform not only the media landscape but the capacities of modern consumers.

Amanda Aggio

Massey University Child Digital Labor: an investigation into experiences of young children within Advertising Platform The fact that children are going online progressively earlier raises critical questions around what they are experiencing in the virtual world. Digital technology has become the necessary infrastructure for capitalism permanence. Data has become a way to profit and digital giants incorporated capitalism under the platform concept. Marxist concepts such as surplus labor and surplus value persist within platform capitalism and it raises issues around how to define digital labor. Furthermore, in this environment one cannot disregard the relationships of power and the government of life; biopolitics should not be dissociable from capitalism. Thus, considering the early stage of young children’s cognitive development and their consequent vulnerability, is urgent to understand how young children contribute in the political economy system of the digital platform.

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PANEL D (ROOM 7C18) Crafting, Mending, Making Do Chair: TBA Susan Luckman

University of South Australia ‘Make Do and Mend’ Today: Craft as object, action and ethics ‘Craft’, broadly conceived, is currently a central tenet of contemporary cultures of capitalism as a core ethos and object of the hipster economy. Precisely because of this, it is hard to know where to start talking about craft, culture and sustainability. The term is presently over-attenuated through constant evocation of the idea of ‘craft’, ‘crafted’ and ‘craftsperson’ as part of wider consumer and cultural trends around the artisanal. But craft too is both noun and verb; working with waste historically has been both craft and crafty. Craft practice has long history of respect for materials, a profound valuing of them including in re-use, and this sensibility continues to inform much craft practice today. So too ideas of workmanship, of quality, and ‘building to last’, have rich and long traditions in craft practice, and persist as salient values in the age of ‘fast fashion’ and accelerating disposability. Drawing from a three-year Australian Research Council (ARC) project, this paper will present examples of sustainability in practice among contemporary Australian makers. It draws from our interview data where participants either explicitly or implicitly engaged with issues connected to a concern for the environment, waste and cultures of consumption. Re-thinking ‘waste’, up-cycling, thoughtful materials sourcing, ‘whole of animal’ use, low carbon futures and digital tools, as well as final object repair and longevity, all emerge here as ways in which makers negotiate the impacts of their practice in the Anthropocene, with its profound human effects upon the environment.

Dinah Vincent

Massey University Domestic dressmaking in mid-twentieth century New Zealand: stitching up a modern identity This paper looks at domestic dressmaking as a way girls and women engaged with modernity and created identity in mid-twentieth century New Zealand. Dressmaking is popularly understood to have been near universal for previous generations of women, yet little work has been done on what the practice meant for the girls and women who used it as a primary dress strategy. The paper focuses on the material culture of dressmaking to show how the practice influenced practitioners’ actions and choices over generations. It looks at the purchasing decisions associated with dressmaking, of fabrics and equipment, to consider how these choices reflect both individual and familial values and aspirations. It argues that dressmaking gave practitioners a way to explore and experiment with modernity. It shows how the appearance created by dressmaking contributed to the practitioners’ sense of identity beyond the home. The paper uses generational chains of mothers and daughters, created by working outwards from interviews with women who went to school between 1945 and 1965. 129

Karma Eddison-Cogan

University of Sydney On the Sidewalk: Spatial Practices and the Garage Sale The increasing visibility of waste as a source for creative potential has prompted initiatives to collectively rethink and remake spaces of the neighbourhood. The City of Sydney Council promotes neighbourhood garage sales such as the Garage Sale Trail event as opportunities to transform everyday spaces into transitory “pop-up” shops. The event itself promotes walking in the neighbourhood from one sale to another as a foundation for community-building. The front yard, back yard, garage, sidewalk, and community hall, as well as the digital networks that overlay and intersect with these spaces, are examples of places of neighbourhood encounter that are central to the event. These spaces are made and re-made as spaces of connection and disconnection, as spaces of friendliness and sociability, and as places where “treasure” can be found among trash. This paper will explore the meanings surrounding everyday space, “commercial” activity, neighbourhood encounter, and social relations in the context of The Garage Sale Trail in Sydney. As hubs for buying, selling, and swapping second-hand items and stories about those items, attitudes towards these sales ricochet between retail and non-retail in the minds of participants. Through ethnographic work with participants of the event, this paper will consider the ways in which everyday spatial practices are performed alongside discourses of creative reuse. This paper aims to provide insight into the way that these discourses spatially organise the neighbourhood and the ways that spatial practices impact on social relations.

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PANEL E (BLOCK 10, PRESENTATION D) Embodied Capitalism Chair: Pansy Duncan Anne-Marie Murtola

Auckland University of Technology Selling the body or working for capital? This paper critically scrutinises the practice of corporate body tattooing. I track the history of the concept, outline its contemporary relevance, and compare it to other bodily practices that share traits with it, such as prostitution and gestational surrogacy. I first analyse it in terms of commodification, and more specifically, commodification of the body, in which I identify the important points of debate around the pratices of body for sale in the relevant literatures. However, this case along with the other examples above also bring into light the critical limits of such an analysis as often practiced in commodification and cultural studies. In the excessive emphasis on the moment of exchange as the deciding factor, the fact that these practices are also very much acts of labour easily falls out of the picture. Cultures of capitalism involve not only market exchange and consumption, with all the attributes that come with that. Involved are not only items, practices and bodies on the market for sale, but also and perhaps more importantly bodies and lives put to work for capital.

Nicole Matthews

Macquarie University Marketing hearables: demedicalisation, debility and consumer power Hearing devices, often seen as a stigmatizing signs of old age and disability, are increasingly converging with mobile phones. Hard of hearing and deaf users of these devices are able to use their mobiles as portable microphones and remote controls, and stream calls and music directly to their aids. Such innovations, alongside online fitting and selling of hearing aids, have been seen as offering empowerment to consumers and disrupting the vertically integrated audiology industry. This paper will explore the emerging strategies of medical tech and communications corporations for using the affordances of convergent “hearables” and begin to draw out the implications for cultural understandings of normalcy, ageing, disability and “hearing loss”. It will focus on two case studies of hearing apps – Cochlear’s Nucleus app for “recipients” of cochlear implants and Mimi Hearing Technologies’s online hearing test and music app, which adjusts streamed sound to the listener’s “hearing age”. This paper will unpack the ways in which these companies publicise and market their apps and how they frame and address their consumers. The paper will draw on Mitchell and Snyder’s use of the concept of debility; the argument that, within neoliberalism, that “nearly all bodies are referenced as debilitated and in need of market commodities to shore up their beleaguered cognitive, physical, affective, and aesthetic shortcomings” (Mitchell and Snyder, 2015, 12). More broadly, the paper will return to questions of demedicalisation, asking whether the uptake of these apps might help realign relationships between health professionals, corporations and users of “hearable” technologies.

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Fu-Jen Chen

Sun Yat-Sen (Taiwan) Disabled Body in Contemporary Global Capitalism Today, the postmodern-global-capitalist regime favors a new mode of subjectivity: refusing a stabilized or unified identity, one incessantly indulges him- or herself in an activity of contingent identification as well as temporary embodiment. His or her identity becomes performatively enacted and open to multiplicity. No longer constituted by a lack of some repressed content prohibited by the symbolic law, his or her desire is expansive, productive, and connective. While desire is of abundance rather than of lack, his or her body is seen as an assemblage of machines producing desire. The body is a becoming, not a being. Along with more prosthetic connections, accumulations, or, rather, consumptions, the body in the post-human era frees life from limits. Though once downgraded to the status of non-productive labor, thereby being excluded from advertising and society, people with disabilities are now specifically marketed within today’s prevailing climate of global consumption. Thanks to the rise of biotechnology and genetic technology, dis/ability is re-defined as a commodity and transformed into services, products, rehabilitation, and medical industries. Dis/ability is employed to create a large economic market. To embrace a body with a proliferation of machinic connection, people with disabilities, however, are at risk of being reduced to the role of consumer and their agency to the practice of accumulation and consumption. Clearly, such a celebration of the new mode of subjectivity and a market-based solution to ableism are in tune with the logic of capitalism.

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PANEL F (ROOM ESS) Politics Online II Chair: TBA Kevin Veale

Massey University “Is it OK to Punch a Nazi? (Spoiler Alert: Yes) – How the Discursive Construction of “Free Speech” Helps Social Networks Profit From Abuse. Online hate-mobs and harassment communities, including those associated with the white supremacists who prefer the branding of ‘alt-right’, often justify their actions with appeals to “freedom of speech”. In doing so they are able to sidestep any consequences for their communicative actions, while also silencing alternative points of view with threats and harassment. Twitter justifies a laissez-faire approach to handling online harassment with the logic that it is a platform dedicated to principles of freedom of speech. At the same time, it rigorously enforces corporate claims on copyright and content: Twitter can pull down gifs of footage from the Olympics in minutes, but is unmotivated to stop gifs designed to trigger epileptic seizures or imagery of Holocaust atrocities, partly because it profits from their distribution. This study explores whether Twitter’s public statements regarding adhering to free-speech principles apply the same discursive logics used by harassment communities. We take as our starting point an incident involving ‘alt-right’ leader Richard Spencer, who was punched in the face by an anti-fascist protestor on the day of Donald Trump’s inauguration. We use this as a case to investigate how ‘free speech’ is constructed by right-wing groups online. Doing so will underline that any opposition to right wing ideology and white supremacy is framed as against principles of free speech. At the same time, it will highlight that the financial motivation for social networks to allow online harassment also motivates them to circulate images of resistance – such as the memes created in response to Richard Spencer being punched. We argue that punching Nazis can be a message that punctures the discursive ownership of freespeech constructed by harassment communities, and which can thrive despite the neo-liberal capitalist context of social network platforms.

Benjamin Matthews

Western Sydney University Precarity and Resistance in the “Orgnet”: Exploring the Enspiral Network A global environment marked by increased labour precarity and isolation for people engaged in media work has stimulated a rise in organised networks of individuals who draw on their range of literacies to participate in a culture of collective agency (Deuze 2007, 2009, 2010; Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2013; Waters-Lynch & Potts, 2016; Waters-Lynch, Potts, Butcher, Dodson, & Hurley, 2016). This paper presents a case study – the “Enspiral Network”, established in 2010 in Wellington, New Zealand, as a marker of current trends and a harbinger of future responses to precarity. The network 133

relies on hybrid structures and modified worker practices to mediate and update the hierarchical underpinning to corporate industrial settings. Cloud-based software created by the network permits decentralised governance of collective activity, recording decentralised decision-making by a distributed group. This spatial and temporal fluidity and organisational transparency are motifs explored rigorously by network members, who adopt a reflexive approach to their practices by writing and publishing, hosting and participating in embodied and digital fora. Here, social enterprise is presented as a basis for activism that promotes the global whilst nurturing the local though both everyday and public forms of resistance. The paper uses Lovink and Rossiter’s concept of the “orgnet” to locate Enspiral in a larger picture of interacting networks, arguing its novel sustainability is a product of social and technical systems where entrepreneurialism and resistance mix as part of ethically framed capitalism (Rossiter, 2006; Lovink & Rossiter, 2010, 2016). Network participants exhibit a compelling ambivalence, functioning sustainably within, whilst working to resist and update contemporaneous organisational paradigms of the media industries.

Mark Davis

University of Melbourne Theorising the anti-public sphere In this paper I outline the ‘anti-public sphere’ as an object for analysis, defined as that vast, diverse domain of often-fractious socio-political interaction that radically contravenes the ethical, ‘rationalcritical’ norms and practices of the traditionally conceived public sphere. This is the discursive space of white supremacist websites, irrational anti-vaccination websites and anti-climate science forums, misogynyst bulletin board communities, extreme ‘alt-right’, and conspiracy websites, to name a few, where discussion flouts norms of public debate, rules of argument and requirements for the rational consideration of evidence for its own ends. Building on earlier work on anti-publics by McKenzie Wark and Bart Cammaerts, I argue that despite its size and complexity it is possible and necessary to theorise this heterogeneous space, not least because it is so often overlooked, even as the meanings developed by anti-publics increasingly intermingle with and inform everyday political discourse. The proliferation of online anti-publics, I argue is a predictable characteristic of neoliberal capitalism and the specific forms of populism it engenders.

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PANEL G (BLOCK 10, PRESENTATION E) Politics and Power in Popular Music Chair: Ian Huffer Samuel Whiting

RMIT “That was where I worked, it’s where I did all my socializing, that’s where I played all my shows”: small live music venues and alternative forms of capital Small live music venues act as social hubs for music scenes (Bennett 1997; Gallan and Gibson 2013). They are spaces where people go to socialise, be with their friends, and watch live music, but are also spaces where emerging artists establish themselves and build a following. Therefore, the interactions and exchanges of capital—economic, social and cultural—that occur within small venues is integral to the broader music scene of the city and the role of small venues as social hubs. This has implications for the cultural and creative industries of cities in a post-industrial context. This paper will present key selected findings from my doctoral research, focusing on two small live music venues in Melbourne’s inner-north, The Tote and The Old Bar. Using an ethnographic framework drawing on face-to-face interviews and participant observation, the results of my research indicate the importance of small scale venues as key components within the live music ecology (Behr, Brennan, Cloonan, Frith, and Webster 2016). These results demonstrate the dual-role of small venues as social hubs and entry-points into the local live music ecology, and the importance of social and cultural capital within these spaces, using two venues in Melbourne’s inner-north as primary case studies.

Jess Carniel

University of Southern Queensland Euro Neuro: the cultural and political economies of the Eurovision Song Contest The Eurovision Song Contest is big business. Not only do host countries spend an average of between 10 and 20 million euro on the production (Azerbaijan spent 53 million euro), but it stimulates economies through tourism and employment opportunities in the production itself and the construction of necessary infrastructure. In addition to this, countries pay an entry fee to participate, which in 2017 totaled 6.2 million euro. The fee itself varies; as explained by the contest administrators, “This fee is different for each country based on the solidarity principle that the strongest shoulders carry most weight” (Eurovision Song Contest website 2017). The greatest burden is carried by the socalled “Big Five” – the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy – and in exchange for their contributions these countries receive automatic entry into the Eurovision grand final each year. This paper explores how contemporary and historical economic and political relationships in Europe (and Australia) play out on the cultural stage of the Eurovision Song Contest. It contends that the Big Five function as a Eurovision “security council”; in securing the financial basis of the contest, the privileges awarded the Big Five function to maintain a western-centric model of economic, political and cultural power in the microcosm of European relations enacted through the Eurovision Song Contest. 135

Ian Rogers

RMIT Rock Undead: Rock and roll’s long march back to the margins In 1994, Lawrence Grossberg located rock music as an ‘affective machine,’ a social ‘formation’ inseparable from other cultural and social practices. Rock’s power, according to Grossberg, is forged in its connection to popular culture and to individual listeners. But in recent years, rock has declined in popularity and commercial viability. Once considered the very centre of a popular music monoculture — and governing with an appropriately imperialist zeal — rock now appears defanged and, for a new generation of music critics, outmoded. What remains is an unusual field of production: a highly successful, nostalgia-fuelled old guard (last century creations, to a band) alongside a small spattering of new commercial entrants (psychedelic rock, emboldened metal-tinged rock, the occasional indie break-out) all rising up from a rich tradition of locally-enacted, locally-focused underground practice. But what does this mean for the scholarship of popular music in 2017? And how might cultural scholars approach the contemporary formation of the genre now that its power to inspire and embolden is so diminished? In this paper, I want to examine the history of rock music studies in its 20th century guises, mapping the macro-perspective and inquisitive tone of that older work to the contemporary setting where rock is retreating from the very attributes that made it historically meaningful.

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Presenter Contact Details Keynotes Professor Patricia Hill Collins University of Maryland [email protected] Professor Jodi Dean Hobart and William Smith Colleges [email protected] Professor Jeremy Gilbert University of East London [email protected] Professor Wendy Larner Victoria University of Wellington [email protected]

Presenters (alphabetic by surname) Name Lisa Adkins Amanda Aggio Nida Ahmad Rafael AlarconMedina Panizza Allmark Fiona Allon Sarah Baker Neil Ballantyne Chloe Banks Alex Beattie Emily Beausoleil Sophie Bond Celina Bortolotto Anita Brady Benedetta Brevini Richard Bromhall

Institution University of Tampere Massey University University of Waikato

email addresses

[email protected]

[email protected]

Simon Fraser University Edith Cowan University University of Sydney Media Design School

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Open Polytechnic [email protected] University of Otago [email protected] Victoria University of Wellington [email protected] Massey University University of Otago

[email protected] [email protected]

Massey University [email protected] Victoria University of Wellington [email protected] University of Sydney

[email protected]

Nottingham Trent University

[email protected] 137

Enda Brophy Jurgen Buchenau Alexia Cameron Clarissa Carden Anna Carlson Jess Carniel Rahna Carusi Elija Cassidy Xu Chen Xiaochun Chen Fu-Jen Chen Ben CherrySmith Chris Chesher Colin Chua Rachel Cole Natalie Collie David Crouch Katarina Damjanov Mark Davis Kay Dickinson Andrew Dickson Zoe Druick Karma Eddison-Cogan Rachel Faleatua Martin Fredriksson Bethany Geckle Bailey Gerrits Mark Gibson Laura Glitsos Michael Goddard James Hall Yao Haoyun

Simon Fraser University

[email protected]

UNC Charlotte

[email protected]

RMIT

[email protected]

Griffith University University of Tasmania University of Southern Queensland Massey University QUT QUT

[email protected]

Southwest University (China) Sun Yat-Sen (Taiwan)

[email protected] [email protected]

Griffith University University of Sydney University of New South Wales University of Sydney University of Queensland University of Western Australia

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

University of Western Australia University of Melbourne Concordia University

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Massey University Simon Fraser University

[email protected] [email protected]

University of Sydney

[email protected]

University of Sydney

[email protected]

[email protected] [email protected]

Linköping University

[email protected]

University of Otago Queen's University Monash University Curtin University

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

University of Westminster Edith Cowan University Yangzhou University

[email protected] [email protected] 138

Melissa Hardie Jennifer Henderson Claire Henry Andrew Hickey Catherine Hoad Dawn Hoogveen Wayne Hope Teresa Housel Shakira Hussein Katrina Jaworski Alison Jeffrey Michael Jensen Sandra Jeppesen Zita Joyce Tim Jurgens Nguyen Khanh Barry King Jill Kramer Kathleen Kuehn Susan Leong Susan Luckman Natalya Lusty Yafei Lyu Michael Mann Jill Massino Nicole Matthews Benjamin Matthews Elena Maydell Jodi Mcalister

University of Sydney Carleton University Massey University University of Southern Queensland

[email protected] [email protected]

Macquarie University

[email protected]

[email protected]

University of British Columbia Auckland University of Technology Massey University University of Melbourne

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

University of South Australia University of Waikato University of Canberra Lakehead University University of Canterbury Massey University

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Massey University Auckland University of Technology Macquarie University

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Victoria University of Wellington [email protected] Curtin University University of South Australia University of Sydney University of Canterbury University of Auckland UNC Charlotte

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Macquarie University Western Sydney University Massey University University of Tasmania

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] 139

Hannah Mccann Amy Mead Allen Meek Benjamin Morgan Georgia Munro-Cook Anne-Marie Murtola Yiannis Mylonas Camille Nakhid Tai Neilson Raphaël Nowak Pat O'Grady Grace O’Leary Rebecca Olive Marcela PalominoSchalscha Liz Patrick Robert Payne Kyra Pearson Sean Phelan Annalise Pippard Tzarina Prater Russell Prince Damien Puddle Holly RandellMoon Lewis Rarm Guy Redden Michael Richardson Ian Rogers Michel Rubin Leon Salter Khairut Salum Michael Scott

University of Melbourne Flinders University Massey University

[email protected]] [email protected]

RMIT

[email protected]

University of Sydney Auckland University of Technology Higher School of Economics (Moscow) Auckland University of Technology Macquarie University

[email protected]

Griffith University Macquarie University University of Waikato University of Waikato

[email protected] [email protected]

Victoria University of Wellington Massey University American University of Paris Loyola Marymount University Massey University

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

University of Sydney Bentley University Massey University

[email protected]

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

University of Waikato University of Otago Auckland University of Technology University of Sydney

[email protected]

University of New South Wales RMIT Monash University Massey University University of Washington Flinders University

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

[email protected] [email protected]

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[email protected]

Cynthia Sear Karin Sellberg Nayantara Sheoran Appleton David Shumway Harmony Siganporia Lisa Slater Jo Smith Anoosh Soltani Elizabeth Stephens Jon Stratton Roberto Strongman Meshell Sturgis Mohammed Sulaiman Kenneth Surin Luk Swiatek Sy Taffel Jess Taylor Anthea Taylor Nisha Thapliyal

University of Melbourne University of Queensland

[email protected] [email protected]

Victoria University of Wellington [email protected] [email protected] Carnegie Mellon University Maryland Institute College of Art [email protected] University of Wollongong [email protected] Victoria University of Wellington [email protected] University of Waikato

[email protected]

University of Queensland University of South Australia University of California, Santa Barbara

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

University of Washington [email protected]

University of South Australia Duke University Massey University Massey University Edith Cowan University University of Sydney

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

[email protected] [email protected]

University of Newcastle Maryland Institute College of Pooja Thomas Art Jay Daniel Thompson University of Melbourne Peter Thompson Victoria University of Wellington Holly Thorpe University of Waikato Joanne Tompkins Rebecca Auckland University of Trelease Technology Massimiliana Urbano University of Otago Jorge Valdovinos University of Sydney Kevin Veale Massey University 141

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

Amy Villarejo Linda Daniela Villegas Dinah Vincent Lisa Vonk Briohny Walker Lee Wallace

Cornell University University of Sydney Massey University Massey University

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

University of Tasmania University of Sydney University of Southern Rachel Wallis Queensland Janell Watson Virginia Tech Caroline West George Mason University Belinda Wheaton University of Waikato Andrew Whelan University of Wollongong Samuel Whiting RMIT Neftalie Williams University of Waikato Caroline Wilson-Barnao University of Queensland Jian Xiao Loughborough University Hanna Ylöstalo University of Tampere Su-lin Yu National Cheng Kung University Haiqing Yu University of New South Wales Aifeng Zhang Yangzhou University

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[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]

[email protected] [email protected]

[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]