Conspiracy Nation: Ariel Bogle & Cam Wilson in conversation (Wed 13 Aug, 5:30pm-7:30pm)

Wednesday August 13, 2025
5:30pm-7:30pm
Robert Webster Building, Room 327

To coincide with the launch of their new book, Conspiracy Nation, we have authors and award-winning journalists Ariel Bogle & Cam Wilson in conversation with SAM PhD student and journalist Seamus Byrne. Learn what it has taken to report on the state of conspiracy theories and their communities in Australia today, and how the digital media landscape influences the nature of these groups and their beliefs.

“Through new investigations and first-hand accounts, Conspiracy Nation takes readers to the rallies, homes, courtrooms, secret chat rooms and $2000 Byron Bay luxury retreats where Australia’s conspiracy theories spread. From Port Arthur and QAnon, to the rise of ‘wellness’ influencers and ‘sovereign citizen’ gurus, to the delusions that inspired the Wieambilla murders, Bogle and Wilson show the devastating consequences of unchecked lies and radicalisation, and make a compelling case that by ignoring the looming threat of conspiratorial thinking, we put our community at risk.”

Books will be available at the event.

https://ultimopress.com.au/products/conspiracy-nation

Media Futures Hub Work-in-Progress (Tues 12 Aug, 1pm-2:30pm)

Tuesday August 12 
1pm–2:30pm 
Morven Brown Room G4

In this work-in-progress session we will be hearing from PhD candidate Sivaan Walker and Professor Anna Munster, who will each present a paper from a current research project. The session will be designed to have ample time for discussion from fellow Hub members, so come ready to listen and respond! Bring your lunch, bring a beverage. 

The two papers will be:

Sivaan Walker, ‘Critical Drawing Theory’ 

Anna Munster, ‘Managerialism, Tonality, and Chat AI’

SEMINAR & SCREENING: Professor Alison Phipps: Keep Telling of Gaza: Ways of Enduring with the Ashlaa of the Palestinian Universities in Gaza (Mon 3 Nov, 10am-1pm)

Seminar and screening: Alison Phipps, ‘Keep Telling of Gaza: Ways of Enduring with the Ashlaa of the Palestinian Universities in Gaza.’
Monday November 3, 2025
10am-1pm

On International Education Day 2025 Palestinian students and academics released a film of testimonials of hope documenting their enduring commitment to studying and to providing education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5MmIDc1LXE

The film reflects the experiences of the UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and Arts in working through the scholasticide with students and academic staff, since they resumed teaching in March 2024, despite the worsening conditions of the Israeli occupation and genocidal campaign.

In this seminar Alison will briefly contextualise her present work with Gaza by outlining the work undertaken previously, before focusing on the actions being taken in the present to enable students and academics to resume their studies, to work with the overwhelming scale of loss, ashlaa, destruction and mourning for fellow students and academic teachers, and to enable a fragile, networked infrastructure to form through the work of solidarity with global movements and with international universities.

In particular, she will focus on the work of Amani Al Maqdaha and Sultan Barakat in their vital reports on the needs assessment and leadership requires for rebuilding higher education; on the University of Glasgow and Qatar Summits and the work of the Royal Society of Edinburgh to document actions universities are taking, can take and where there are critical barriers. She will also refer to two articles she has recently published in Curriculum Perspectives and Language and Intercultural Communication, and to her best selling book of poetry Keep Telling of Gaza, with Khawla Badwan.

She will be accompanied in the seminar by her colleague Dr Tawona Sitholé who has worked as Research Associate and Lecturer in Creative Practice Education and co-editor with Alison and with Dr Hyab Yohannes, of Cultures of Sustainable Peace, an open access book containing several chapters published by colleague in Gaza during the scholasticide. Tawona is a poet and will bring his words to the seminar as counter point.

Alison Phipps is the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Education, Languages and the Arts at the University of Glasgow and Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies. She was De Carle Distinguished Visiting Professor at Otago University, Aotearoa New Zealand 2019-2020, Thinker in Residence at the EU Hawke Centre, University of South Australia in 2016, Visiting Professor at Auckland University of Technology, and Principal Investigator for AHRC Large Grant ‘Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the body, law and the state’; for Cultures of Sustainable and Inclusive Peace, and was Co-Director of the Global Challenge Research Fund South South Migration Hub 2019-2024. She is an Ambassador for the Scottish Refugee Council. She received an OBE in 2012  and Honorary Doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Waterloo, Canada in 2023. She is an academic, activist, educator, essayist and published poet and a member of the Iona Community.

This talk is hosted by the UNSW Media Futures Hub.

On Musement and Radical Thought: Associate Professor Eldritch Priest, Simon Fraser University (Mon 4 Aug, 12pm-1:30pm)

Monday August 4, 2025
12 – 1:30pm
Robert Webster 250

In 1908, near the end of his life, Charles Sanders Peirce published an essay that argued for the soundness of a belief in the reality of God. Central to his argument is the practice of daydreaming, an “agreeable occupation of mind” that he names “musement.” In musement, Peirce claims, we have a tendency to speculate on the origins of some wonder or another, a tendency he insists naturally leads to a belief in God. Although Peirce’s argument is full of holes and in fact is not even an argument in the traditional sense of the term, his musings on musement as a method for attending to the spontaneity of thought provides a way to think about daydreaming as a kind of science of guessing. But daydreaming is a type of thinking whose worth is (traditionally) tied up in its not being valuable for what use it can be put. In this regard, it’s better to think of daydreaming as an art than a science and its worth closer to what Jean Baudrillard called “radical thought.” In this talk, then, I muse on Peirce’s musings to consider musement’s  hol(e)y tendencies and to propose that musement is an imaginary solution of the type favoured by pataphysicians. As such, I conclude that it is good for the kind of nothing that is, strangely, good for radical thinking.  

Eldritch Priest writes on sonic culture, experimental aesthetics, and the philosophy of experience from a ’pataphysical perspective. He is Associate Professor in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University. Eldritch is also a composer and improviser, as well as a member of the experimental theory group “The Occulture.” He is the author of several essays and books including Boring Formless Nonsense: Experimental Music and the Aesthetics ofFailure (Bloomsbury 2013) and most recently, Earworm and Event: Music, Daydreams, and Other Imaginary Refrains (Duke University Press 2022). 

This talk is hosted by the UNSW Media Futures Hub.

Palestine Today Seminar Series

The Media Futures Hub presents Palestine Today, a seminar series grappling with the unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the global mass mobilisations that insist on Palestinian liberation. The series is part of the hub’s Racial Technologies stream, which investigates race as technology, as well as race and technology. The former considers race as a technology concerned with the organisation, management, and exploitation of human difference, analysing its evolution in relation to the extractive regimes of colonialism and capitalism. The latter challenges the assumption that technologies are neutral or objective, interrogating how racial logics and forms of discrimination come to be embedded and encoded into technical systems. These twin logics converge in the context of Israel’s siege on historic Palestine with devastating effects. The series will feature scholars from UNSW whose work explores the current and historical situation in Palestine and Israel, thinking across media and cultural studies, law and philosophy, sociology and international relations. The seminar will create a space for critical thinking and will consider what the role of scholarship is in times of catastrophe.

Seminar program:

Seminar 1: Jessica Whyte, War against the People: The ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ as a Technology of Genocide
Tuesday 15 July, 12 – 1:30pm
UNSW Business School Room 220

Abstract: On May 19th, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office announced that, after blocking all food from entering Gaza for eleven weeks, it would allow a limited amount of “basic food” into the besieged territory. At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that “Israel will act to deny Hamas the ability to seize control of the distribution of humanitarian aid in order to ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas terrorists”. This paper examines the new militarised aid delivery system approved by Israel’s security cabinet, with a focus on ‘the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)’, an opaque private company headquartered in Geneva, which Israel has tasked with aid distribution. In the first month of its operations, the GHF’s distribution sites became scenes of almost daily massacres and by June 22nd, the United Nations announced that “since Israel eased its total blockade last month, more than 400 people are reported to have died trying to reach food distribution points.” This paper places the GHF in the lineage of colonial counter-insurgency from the Algerian War of Independence to the US occupation of Iraq. Central to that tradition was a claim that separating civilians from fighters was the best means to protect and sustain the former. In this paper, I draw on work with Ihab Shalbak on the Palestinian attempt to challenge this counter-insurgency war in international law. (Shalbak and Whyte, “The War Against the People and the People’s War: Palestine and the Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions,” 2023). I argue that while the GHF has been lauded as a means to “sever the ideological and service-based ties between Hamas and Gaza’s population,” (HaCohen, 2024) it should instead be seen as a mechanism of the total “war against the people” of Palestine that Israel has waged in various forms since its inception. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is the apotheosis of the instrumentalization of aid—not in the service of survival but in the service of colonial genocide.

Speaker Bio: Jessica Whyte is Scientia Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of New South Wales and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Her work integrates political philosophy, intellectual history and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism and militarism. Her most recent book is The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (2019). She is currently writing about economic coercion and economic sanctions after the Cold War.

Seminar 2: Andrew Brooks, ‘Automating Death, Automating Debility’
Tuesday 31 July, 12 – 1:30pm
UNSW Business School Room 220

Seminar 3: Noam Peleg, ‘There are no children in Gaza: racial erasure and live bullets’
Thursday 21 August, 12 – 1:30pm
UNSW Business School Room 220

Seminar 4: Lana Tatour, ‘Narcissim in Times of Genocide’
Thursday 25 September, 12 – 1:30pm
UNSW Old Main Building 150

This series is hosted by the UNSW Media Futures Hub.

Sukhmani Khorana appointed to the Federal Ethnic Communities’ Council of Australia’s (FECCA) Media Literacy Program Advisory Group (PAG)

Sukhmani Khorana has been appointed to the Federal Ethnic Communities’ Council of Australia’s (FECCA) Media Literacy Program Advisory Group (PAG). She will provide strategic guidance on the design, development and implementation of the Media Literacy Program which will be administered by a network of community-based organisations.

WORKSHOP: What Data Can't Hear (Mon 2 Dec, 9am-4pm)

What data can't hear: A one day blue sky workshop
Convenors: Tanja Dreher, Danielle Hynes, Poppy de Souza

Monday 2 December 2024,
9:00am-4:00pm (AEST)
ADA Innovation Hub, Goodsell Building Room 102/103
University of New South Wales, Kensington Campus, Sydney, Australia 
Hosted by UNSW Data Justice Research Network and UNSW Media Futures Hub

View the program here

Data-driven systems, platforms and algorithms are increasingly embedded in all aspects of social life and daily communication. This ‘ubiquitous datafication’ is evident across domains including social housing and the NDIS, ‘care’ institutions, and health, education and politics. In this workshop we explore the implications of the datafication of the social world for processes and practices of political voice and listening.

Datafied systems are claimed to offer increased opportunities to have a say, to be heard in decision making and service provision, and to be part of governance structures. In the context of neoliberalism, these platformed opportunities and incitements to speak proliferate, however this is a version of voice that matters less and less. By centring political voice, we draw attention to voice as agency, participation and influence – or voice that matters. The listening lens turns attention to processes and practices of receptivity, recognition and response to political voice, participation and agency.

In this workshop, we consider questions around the increasing ubiquity of datafied voice and listening, including but not limited to the following: 

• How does datafication enable or constrain voice as agency or self-determination?

• IIn addition to questions of who can speak, participate or have a say - who or what is heard in data-driven systems?

• Can data hear structural or systemic violence, injustice or critique?

• How are data driven systems able to hear - or not hear - political voice?

For example, what might be the benefits and harms of automated decision-making in disability services for the ‘voice’ and agency of people with disability? How do apps and platforms shape opportunities for resident voice in social housing and renting? How do the extractive logics of contemporary algorithms impact self-determination and sovereignty?

WORKSHOP: From PhD to PostDoc (Tues 15 Oct, 4pm-5pm)

Tuesday 15 October 2024
4:00-5:00pm (AEST)
In person at the ADA Innovation Hub, Goodsell Building Room 102/103 and online via Zoom.
For those joining in person, the workshop will be followed by informal drinks.

Recent years have seen a move from approaching the PhD experience as aimed primarily at the production of a thesis, to the more expansive aim of cultivating a researcher (Lee and Boud 2009). In this workshop you will hear from two postdoctoral researchers who have recently completed their PhDs at UNSW. Speakers will share their experiences of moving from PhD to Postdoc, sharing tips and strategies learned along the way. The discussion will draw out the activities, roles and work beyond the production of the thesis that can be valuable or even necessary for HDRs who are aiming for pathways in academia. How can HDRs best position themselves for postdoctoral opportunities beyond the thesis? What is the contribution and value of research networks in the development of researchers? What are the opportunities and challenges of the increasing emphasis on impact and engagement and the growing expectations that HDRs develop entrepreneurial capacities? How can HDRs find Postdoc opportunities and then position themselves as the best candidate? The workshop will begin with short informal presentations and include ample time for questions and discussion.  

Featured speakers: Dr Danielle Hynes (Maynooth) and Dr Kevin Witzenberger (QUT) 
Chair: Professor Lyria Bennett-Moses (UNSW) 
Further comments: Scientia A/Prof Sukhmani Khorana (UNSW) and A/Prof Tanja Dreher (UNSW) 

SPEAKER BIOS 

Dr Danielle Hynes is an engaged social researcher with a background in both media and cultural studies, and urban studies. As a post-doctoral researcher on the Data Stories project at Maynooth University, Danielle is working alongside the team to examine how data is mobilised and used by various actors, focusing critical attention on Irish planning, property and planning housing data. Her doctoral research explored social justice in cities, and how imaginaries of the city are shaping the present and future of non-market housing, analysing the widespread influence of neoliberalism on the Australian social housing (for both residents and the structure of social housing) and identifying more just possibilities. 

Dr Kevin Witzenberger is a research fellow at QUT’s GenAI Lab. Grounded in media theory and science and technology studies (STS), his research focuses on the risks and opportunities of generative AI in society and making technical democracy a defining feature in governing the future of generative AI. In his role at the GenAI Lab, Kevin is also affiliated with the ADM+S where he contributes to the exploration of exploring authenticity as both a socio-technical challenge and as a contested cultural idea in the context of generative AI. Kevin received his PhD from the University of New South Wales in 2023 where he investigated the impact of automation and AI on education governance as a member of the Media Futures Hub and is co-founder of the Education Futures Studio at the University of Sydney. 

Hosted by the UNSW Data Justice Reserach Network and the UNSW Media Futures Hub.

The Crisis of Diversity: Professor Anamik Saha, University of Leeds (Tues 8 Oct, 2pm-3:00pm)

Tuesday 8 October 2024
2:00-3:00pm (AEST)
Morvern Brown 310

The seminar by Anamik Saha will be followed by an informal workshop at 3:30-5pm. For further details please email: t.dreher@unsw.edu.au.

Despite the superdiversity we now encounter on our screens, issues of diversity in media industries and society at large, remain vexed. While previously a soft, somewhat inoffensive term, ‘diversity’ has hardened into something politically controversial - along with its siblings, ‘equality’ and ‘inclusion’. Diversity is attacked by the Left for its ineffectiveness in dealing with racial inequalities, burying the more assertive language of racism and discrimination demanded by anti-racist activists. It is also attacked by the Right for, at ‘best’, its threat to meritocracy, and at worst, its purported demonisation of White people.  

Once at the bedrock of creative industries policy, diversity was seen as the source of originality and innovation and economic growth. Undeniably this has had a profound impact on the media we consume. Yet this has not been mirrored in the creative workforce, where diversity policies have failed to increase the number of people from marginalised backgrounds within its ranks. Compounded by economic and political pressures, these failing initiatives have fallen by the wayside, as big brands bin diversity targets due to political pressure, or quietly drop EDI efforts as they contend with ‘bigger’ financial issues. Worst of all, the crisis of diversity just so happens to be unfolding alongside the violent ascendency of the far-right in liberal democracies. 

But while this suggests that diversity is done, in this paper I take a wider view and examine the crisis in diversity in media in conjunctural terms. I consider how cultural and creative industries are (or, are not) contending with the biggest crisis right now: the rise of the far-right. Rather than ineffectual against the far-right, could it be the case that diversity has put the brakes somewhat on its advance? The paper imagines how media can proactively challenge racism in society, and how a radical reimagining of diversity can contribute to this urgent task. 

Anamik Saha is a Professor in Race and Media in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. His research is on issues of race, culture and media, with a particular focus on creative and cultural industries and issues of ‘diversity’. He is the author of Race and the Cultural Industries (Polity, 2018), Race, Culture and Media (Sage, 2021) and the co-author of the AHRC-funded industry report Rethinking ‘Diversity’ in Publishing (with Dr Sandra van Lente, Goldsmiths Press, 2020). His research has featured across a range of media, including BBC Radio, The Guardian, TES and The New Statesman.  He was included in the TheBookseller’s 2020 list of most influential people in the book trade. He is an editor of European Journal of Cultural Studies. His new book The Anti-Racist Media Manifesto- written with Francesca Sobande and Gavan Titley - is out in Autumn 2024. 

This talk is hosted by the UNSW Media Futures Hub.

Register here.

BOOK LAUNCH: Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World by Michael Richardson (Tues 10 Sep, 5pm)

Tuesday 10 September 2024

5pm – 7pm, with words at 6pm

Io Myers Theatre Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab
UNSW School of the Arts & Media
Gate 2, High St, Kensington Campus

Please join us to celebrate the launch of Associate Professor Michael Richardson’s new book Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World with drinks, snacks, and words from Andrew Brooks and Astrid, aka Snack Syndicate. Out now with Duke University Press, the book calls for the radical transformation of how we understand witnessing in an age of crises.

Copies will be available for purchase at a discounted rate of $30. While not essential, registering helps us plan catering, seating, and other aspects of the event.

About the book:

In Nonhuman Witnessing Michael Richardson argues that a radical rethinking of what counts as witnessing is central to building frameworks for justice in an era of endless war, ecological catastrophe, and technological capture. Dismantling the primacy and notion of traditional human-based forms of witnessing, Richardson shows how ecological, machinic, and algorithmic forms of witnessing can help us better understand contemporary crises. He examines the media-specificity of nonhuman witnessing across an array of sites, from nuclear testing on First Nations land and autonomous drone warfare to deepfakes, artificial intelligence, and algorithmic investigative tools. Throughout, he illuminates the ethical and political implications of witnessing in an age of profound instability. By challenging readers to rethink their understanding of witnessing, testimony, and trauma in the context of interconnected crises, Richardson reveals the complex entanglements between witnessing and violence and the human and the nonhuman.

About the author:

Michael Richardson is a writer, researcher, and teacher living and working on Gadigal and Bidjigal country. An Associate Professor in the School of the Arts & Media at UNSW Sydney and an Associate Investigator with ADM+S, his research examines how technology, power, and culture shape knowledge in war, security, and surveillance. His latest book is Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology after the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2024).

About Snack Syndicate:

Andrew Brooks is a lecturer in Media and Culture in the School of the Arts and Media, UNSW. Astrid Lorange is a senior lecturer in Art, Writing, and Cultural Theory in the School of Art & Design, UNSW. Together, they make texts, installations, public programs, and study spaces as the critical art collective Snack Syndicate. Their collection of essays, Homework, was published in 2021 by Discipline. They are currently completing a book titled The Art of Unmaking: The Aesthetics of Abolition in Australia.

This talk is hosted by the UNSW Media Futures Hub

Justice by Video: Assistant Professor Sandra Ristovska, University of Colorado Boulder (Fri 14 Jun, 12pm-1:30pm)

Friday 14 June 2024
12:00-1:30pm (AEST)
Robert Webster 334 (in person only)

From cell phones to police body cameras, today’s courts increasingly use video as evidence. A common assumption is that video can help people bear witness to an event as if they themselves were transported to the complicated scene of its unfolding. Rather than the second-hand testimony provided by eyewitnesses, video is assumed to offer an unmediated and firsthand account directly to the decision maker. As a result, U.S. courts, at all levels, lack safeguards to ensure rigorous visual analysis, an issue that is further amplified with the rise of generative AI and deepfakes. Drawing on research conducted during residency with the American Bar Association’s Science and Technology Law Section, this lecture considers the intricacies of using video to bear witness in court. It argues that without consistent guidance and applications for treating video as evidence, human rights and civil rights may be disparately recognized and upheld. 

Sandra Ristovska is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Law at University of Colorado Boulder. Her research examines how, under what circumstances, and to what ends images shape the pursuit of justice and human rights in institutional and legal contexts nationally and internationally. Her publications include the award-winning monograph, Seeing Human Rights: Video Activism as a Proxy Profession (The MIT Press, 2021), an edited book, Visual Imagery and Human Rights Practice (Palgrave, 2018), and over two dozen journal articles and book chapters. Her work has received multiple awards from the International Communication Association (ICA), the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), and the National Communication Association (NCA). 

This talk is hosted by the UNSW Media Futures Hub.

Registration is not required but does help us in event planning. See link below:

Register Here 

SYMPOSIUM: Beyond Media Diversity: Media Practice and Media Studies in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter (Thu 27 Jun, 9am-6pm)

Date and time - 27 June 2024 | 09h00 - 17h00  
Location - University of New South Wales, Kensington Campus, Sydney, Australia  
An IAMCR pre-conference and ‘bridge’ event between ICA 2024 and IAMCR 2024 
https://iamcr.org/christchurch2024/beyond-media-diversity-conf  
Organisers - A/Prof Tanja Dreher, University of New South Wales and A/Prof Sukhmani Khorana,
University of New South Wales   

View the program here

SPEAKERS: This full day symposium will feature presentations and provocations by invited speakers, including: Tito Ambyo (RMIT), A/Prof Debbie Bargallie (Griffith), Prof Mohan Dutta (Massey, online), Prof Gerard Goggin (WSU), Dr Ashleigh Haw (RMIT), A/Prof Eve Ng (Ohio, online), Prof Sandy O’Sullivan (Macquarie), Prof Anamik Saha (Leeds, online), Dr Victor Zhuang (Nanyang).   

Recent years have seen various and continuing ‘media reckonings’ on racism and diversity. The resurgence of #BlackLivesMatter protests across the globe in 2020 brought renewed attention to media racism in Australia and across the Global North. In the midst of the unprecedented violence in Gaza in 2024, concerns around mainstream media racism and cultural safety for those reporting, advocating or speaking out have only amplified manifold. Given the current conjuncture, this symposium aims to move beyond timid framings of diversity that have not worked for media practitioners or scholars, and therefore calls for ‘divesting from diversity’.

Prior to this, resurgent Sinophobia and anti-Asian racism in the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic and entrenched and violent Islamophobia highlighted by the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand, also heightened ‘media diversity debates’ and calls to decolonise media and/or support media anti-racism (Saha, 2020; Titley, 2019). Meanwhile ongoing international interventions in media scholarship such as #communicationsowhite have demonstrated that concerns around media, racism and diversity are highly relevant within media and communication studies as well as in media institutions (Chakravarty et al 2018, Ng et al 2020).

Despite the upsurge in media diversity debates and initiatives in response to these cultural reckonings, the aim of greater diversity has been premised on limiting assumptions. One of the most oft-used ones is that media and those who work in it must ‘reflect’ the demographics of the changing nation state. The media reckoning prompted by Indigenous media presenter Stan Grant’s resignation from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2023 followed decades of diversity initiatives at the public broadcasters. As Christine Dunbar-Hester argues, ‘“diversity” is a timid framing. What would change if the conversation was directed towards justice instead? Much is at stake here and “diversity” offers too little’ (2021).

This pre-conference event takes a transnational approach to framing diversity debates in the media, how these are limiting (and limited), and what decolonial and anti-colonial alternatives could look like. How might we divest from the diversity paradigm, and what might take its place? Where are alternatives to be found, and/or how might they be built? Who is doing the work and what solidarities might be needed? The event thus speaks directly to the IAMCR2024 General theme: ‘Whiria te tāngata / Weaving people together: Communicative projects of decolonising, engaging, and listening’.

Location: The preconference will be held at the Kensington campus of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. The Kensington campus is well connected to Sydney Central station (15 mins by Light Rail) and to Sydney airport (a gateway airport for IAMCR 2024 and ICA 2024). There are many affordable accommodation options nearby.   

Media Futures Hub (https://mediafutureshub.org/) is a collection of scholars at UNSW researching justice, media and emerging technologies. We explore topics such as community and First Nations media, drones and autonomous systems, data justice, listening across difference, everyday uses of media technology, and new research methods. Our research is interventionist, innovative and fearless. Our aim is not only to analyse the world around us, but to help build more just futures.  

Tanja Dreher is Associate Professor in Media and a Co-Director of the Media Futures Hub at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.  Sukhmani Khorana is a Scientia Associate Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, School of the Arts and Media.  

Screening Resistance: A two-part film series

Screening Resistance is a two-part series of screening presenting investigative and documentary films that deal with technologies of statecraft and warfare, settler coloniality and resistance. Responding to the ongoing war in Gaza, this series of films presents work by the multidisciplinary research group, Forensic Architecture and the Palestinian filmmaker Emily Jacir. Both screenings will collect donations for the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network (APAN).

Part 1 - Forensic Architecture: Investigations
Thursday March 28, 6pm–8pm, 
Black Box, UNSW Art & Design, Paddington (Level 1, D Block)

Curated and co-presented by Dogmilk Films.

Forensic Architecture is a multidisciplinary research group based at Goldsmiths University in London. They use architectural techniques and video technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world. The first half of the screening will present two works by Forensic Architecture that examine atmospheric violence (clouds) and oceanic violence (border and forced migration), including a collaborative work with Amel Alzakout. The second half of the screening focuses on investigations related to Gaza and the history of Israeli occupation and oppression. 

This program was curated by Dogmilk in consultation with Forensic Architecture; first presented at Degustations screening series at Miscellania, Naarm. Dogmilk is an independent filmmaking collective dedicated to the promotion and production of alternative and ambitious cinema.

Films include:

‘Cloud Studies’ (2020) 32:59 min
‘Shipwreck at the Threshold of Europe (in collaboration with Amel Alzakout)’ (2015) 23:36 min 
‘Executions and Mass Graves in Tantura, 23 May 1948’ (2023) 17:02 min 
‘The Shelling of Khudair Warehouse: Chemical Warfare by Indirect Means’ (2022) 14:32 min 
‘The Use of White Phosphorous in Urban Environments’ (2012) 06:25 min 
‘Herbicidal Warfare in Gaza’ (2019) 08:50 min 

Part 2 - Emily Jacir: Letter to a Friend (2019)
Thursday April 4, 4pm–5pm, 
Black Box, UNSW Art & Design, Paddington (Level 1, D Block) 

Emily Jacir is an artist, filmmaker and educator who lives and works between Bethlehem and Rome.

In this film, Emily Jacir narrates letters to a friend, Eyal Weizman from Forensic Architecture, about her home and street in Bethlehem. The film essay brings together traces of Palestine from over a century, telling a story of occupation and resistance – past, present and future.

Film:

‘Letter to a Friend’ (2019) 43 min

SYMPOSIUM: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Screen Industries in the Asia Pacific (Thu 27 Jun - Fri 28 Jun)

Date: Thursday, 27 June to Friday 28 June 2024

Location: The University of New South Wales, Kensington Campus, Australia

Artificial intelligence is evolving at an accelerated pace. Its potentials and risks have generated considerable debate in academia, industry, and broader communities. What kinds of human-machine encounters are emerging? In what ways are design, adoption and use of AI anchored to cultural and ethical values? How does AI impact on creative production, media distribution, and cultural consumption? Who stand to gain, and at what cost? What alternatives are possible? To answer these questions necessarily requires a contextualised view.

With a specific focus on screen industries across television, film and streaming, this symposium seeks to explore the pace, nature and potential consequence of change wrought by AI in various cultural, social, and geopolitical contexts in the Asia Pacific. By foregrounding the regional focus, we hope to open up discussions about local specificities in the region and the various dynamics between the local and the regional or global. To this end, we invite submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

- Generative AI and content creation
- Algorithms, content curation and media distribution
- Infrastructural underpinnings and politics
- Changing nature of creative labour and cultural work
- Emerging forms of advertising and approaches to audience measurement
- Changing consumption patterns, audience experience and practices
- Internationalisation, transnational flows, and geopolitics
- Regulation and governance (copyright, content quota, taxes, content moderation, etc.)

We welcome conceptual and empirical approaches as well as methodological reflections.

Organisers:

Elaine Jing Zhao, The University of New South Wales, Australia
Liangwen Kuo, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China
Changfeng Chen, Tsinghua University, China, President of the Asia-Pacific Communication Alliance

How to Submit:

• Extended Abstracts: 500-1000 words, excluding references (only key references should be included)
• Please submit the abstracts as PDF attachments without author identification to jing.zhao@unsw.edu.au and lwkuo@sjtu.edu.cn, and include your name, title, institutional affiliation, email address, and a short bio (up to 100 words) in the body of the email. Please title your email as “response to CFP: title”.

Submission Due: 24 March, 2024

Acceptance Notification: 31 March, 2024

Transportation: UNSW Kensington Campus is about 20 min drive from Sydney CBD and conveniently served by the Light Rail. It is also well connected to Sydney airport (a gateway airport for ICA and IAMCR 2024).

Enquiries: jing.zhao@unsw.edu.au

WORKSHOP: This Mess We’re In - A Workshop on Scene, Crisis, and Conjecture with Dr Andrew Brooks & A/Prof Michael Richardson (Mon 20 Nov, 1-4pm)

Join us for an in-person workshop at UNSW Kensington Campus.

We live in a time of endemic and rolling crises: plague, war, racialised and gendered violence, economic collapse, ecological catastrophe. Crisis is a common term but what exactly does it mean? When does one crisis end and another begin? Cenes are one conceptual tool for trying to make sense of the mess we’re in and they abound these days: Anthropocene (Crutzen and Boehmer), Capitalocene (Moore), Plantationocene (Tsing), just to name a few. A conjuncture refers to the particular contradiction within the social formation in periods of upheaval and unrest. Conjunctural analysis seeks to distinguish between the structural forces that condition a particular historical moment and the immediate forces that drive transformation. Naming and periodising the era in which we find ourselves has become an urgent task of critical scholarship in no small part because this naming is an act of diagnosis that shapes action in response. 

In this research workshop, we will work together on how we might reckon with cene, crisis, and conjuncture. While we will discuss the meaning(s) and contestation(s) that surround these terms, we’ll also delve into the temporality and texture of this mess we’re in – and the political potential of critical theory for scholarship and activism. Our aim is to explore these terms in order to find ways to put them to use in order to intervene in the crises that confront us.

The workshop will take the form of an hour of short presentations on work-in-progress by Media Futures Hub researchers, followed by a two-hour discussion provoked by the readings and introduced by provocations from Andrew and Michael. The workshop will take place in person, followed by drinks for those who want to stick around.
Registration link here.

WORKSHOP: Beyond benign diversity in media industry and scholarship (Fri 13 Oct, 12:30-3:30pm)

Friday 13 October 2023
12.30 – 3.30pm 
UNSW Kensington campus, Sydney and online
Convenors: Tanja Dreher (UNSW) and Sukhmani Khorana (UNSW)

View the program here

Recent years have seen various and continuing ‘media reckonings’ on racism and diversity, from #oscarssowhite to #IStandWithStan. The resurgence of Black Lives Matter protests across the globe in in 2020 brought renewed attention to media racism in Australia and internationally. Resurgent Sinophobia and anti-Asian racism in the context of the global covid19 pandemic and entrenched and violent Islamophobia highlighted again by the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand, have heightened ‘media diversity debates’ and calls to decolonise media and/or support media anti-racism (Saha, 2020; Titley, 2019). The earlier #Oscarssowhite movement focused on screen media sparked momentum for diversity and inclusion initiatives across media industries. Meanwhile international interventions such as #communicationsowhite have demonstrated that concerns around media, racism and diversity are highly relevant within media and communication studies as well as in media institutions (Chakravarty et al 2018, Ng et al 2020).  

The upsurge in media diversity debates and initiatives in response to these cultural reckonings has also prompted critiques and cautionary notes. Too often, the aim of greater diversity has been premised on the limiting assumption that media and those work in it must ‘reflect’ the demographics of the nation state. The media reckoning prompted by Stan Grant’s resignation from the ABC in 2023 followed decades of diversity initiatives at the public broadcasters. Christine Dunbar-Hester argues; “diversity” is a timid framing. What would change if the conversation was directed towards justice instead? Much is at stake here and “diversity” offers too little’ (2021). These cautions resonate with Sara Ahmed’s highly influential work, On Being Included (2020), focused on diversity work in higher education institutions. Ahmed explores the gap between symbolic commitments to diversity and the experience of diversity workers, arguing that racism can be obscured by the institutionalisation of diversity.  

This workshop aims to generate discussion on strategies, traditions and imaginaries beyond timid versions of diversity and the limitations of parity of representation. Two select suggested readings/listenings will be circulated prior to the workshop for all participants to prepare.  

Media Futures Hub (https://mediafutureshub.org/) is a collection of scholars at UNSW researching justice, media and emerging technologies. We explore topics such as community and First Nations media, drones and autonomous systems, data justice, listening across difference, everyday uses of media technology, and new research methods. Our research is interventionist, innovative and fearless. Our aim is not only to analyse the world around us, but to help build more just futures.  

My Rembetika Blues - a film about love, life and Greek Music (Thu 23 Jun, 6:30PM-8:30pm)

Join us for a special Q&A screening of MY REMBETIKA BLUES, a powerful documentary on music and culture featuring director M. Zournazi in attendance.

MY REMBETIKA BLUES

Rembetika music or the Greek blues is a music born of exile and the streets. Developing its roots from the mass migration of people in the early twentieth century, filmmaker M. Zournazi traces the journey of her forebears from Smyrna in Turkey to Sydney Australia but discovers more than family history, she finds out how music connects people during times of struggle and crises. By weaving together different stories of music and migration, she documents experiences that are often left out of the chronicles of history.

Book tickets: https://tinyurl.com/2p8fc6ak

Watch trailer:

PUBLICATION: ‘Listening In’ project report and resources now available online

The public outcomes of the Listening In project are now available via the project website: https://www.listeninginproject.org/.

As the resurgent #BlackLivesMatter movement has prompted a ‘cultural reckoning’ on racism and media in Australia (Thomas et al. 2020) and beyond, the Listening In report seeks to contribute to these vital debates with a focus on community and alternative media, and on institutional listening in response to self-determined voice in media.

The Listening In report is co-authored by Media Futures Hub co-director Tanja Dreher and Media Futures Hub member Poppy de Souza.  It is a major outcome of Dreher’s Australian Research Council Future Fellowship FT140100515 (2015 - 2020).

It provides a snapshot of sovereign and self-determined voice in community media, with a focus on First Nations voices, refugee and asylum seeker voices, women of colour, migrant diaspora communities, and intersectional voices. It presents results of our research on ‘institutional listening’ among policymakers and mainstream journalists. It discusses key challenges to the core values and key functions of community broadcasting in the context of digital disruption, with particular attention to competition for value from social media, and the conflicting values of corporate digital platforms. 

Key findings include:

·       A diverse and dynamic First Nations media sector

·       Contained / constrained racialised voices

·       Limited institutional listening

·       Social media competition and conflicting values

Based on these findings, we call for an increased focus on the pressing challenges of shifting white supremacy and on securing community media values in the context of increasingly influential commercial social media platforms.

Future directions include:

·       Further research is required to understand the persistence of white dominance in a community media sector that is celebrated for diversity.

·      Further research is needed to examine the implications of platforms as infrastructures and ideologies within the media field, rather than simply as tools that can be used in service of community media values

Resources include:

·       A directory of select sovereign and self-determined voice in community media

·       A directory of select ‘media on media’

·       ‘For an Indigenous perspective on ‘Australia Day’, here’s a quick guide to First Nations media platforms’ (with Professor Bronwyn Carlson) - published in The Conversation.

ONLINE EVENT: FUGITIVE PAPERWORK: Documentary practices in literature, art, and history

Media Futures Hub presents a conversation with Joaquín Segura, Carlos Soto Román, Michael Leong, and Livia Lazzaro Rezende, facilitated by Astrid Lorange.

The conversation will focus on different approaches – across criticism, poetry, art, and history – to working with the ‘documents’ of statecraft. How do contemporary practices that work against and beyond the official archive draw our attention to the paper infrastructures that administrate state power? How do such documentary practices suggest new ways of reading the nation-state?

The event will be livestreamed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYpA4CGxwdk

Monday 29 November 10–11:30am (Sydney)

Sunday 28 November 3–4:30pm (Los Angeles)

Sunday 28 November 5–6:30pm (Mexico City)

Sunday 28 November 8–9:30 (Santiago)

Media, Archives, Infrastructure: In conversation with Ethan Blue (26 October, 12 - 1:30pm)

Media Futures Hub and Infrastructural Inequalities co-present Media, Archives, Infrastructure: In conversation with Ethan Blue. The conversation will focus on Blue’s recently published book The Deportation Express: A History of America Through Forced Removal (University of California Press). The conversation will be facilitated by Dr Astrid Lorange (Art & Design) and Dr Andrew Brooks (Arts & Media) and will consider how an infrastructural approach to understanding statecraft, racism, and carcerality offers a particular perspective on doing history and studying the present. The conversation is open to all and will followed by a brief Q&A with the audience. 

Ethan Blue was raised on Coast Miwok land in Northern California and currently lives on unceded Whadjuk Noongar boodja in Western Australia. He is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Western Australia, with research interests at the intersection of critical prison studies and histories of immigration, capitalism, and settler colonialism.

Blue’s monographs and edited volumes include the sole-authored Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York University Press, 2012), the co-authored Engineering and War (Morgan and Claypool, 2014), and the special issue Radical History Review: Punishment and Death: The Need for Radical Analysis (2006).  His most recent book is The Deportation Express: A History of America through Forced Removal (University of California Press, 2021). 

Blue’s writings have appeared in numerous edited volumes and scholarly journals, including Pacific Historical Review; Journal of Social History; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; Humanities Research; Journal of American Ethnic History; Bad Subjects; National Identities; Leonardo, and Settler Colonial Studies.  

 When:  Tuesday, 26 October, 12pm–1:30pm (Sydney time)

Where: Via Zoom (Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86876498290)

Register: Via Eventbrite