CAMRA 2021: Community and Alternative Media Research in Australia

CAMRA 2021 online workshop
Friday 26 February 2021 9.30am – 5pm (AEDT) 

Registrations are now open for the online workshop CAMRA 2021: a snapshot of community and alternative media research in Australia 

This online workshop will showcase, connect and encourage research on community and alternative media in Australia 

Topics include: the emotional labour of minorities in community media; Indigenous Storywork; community media and the politics of listening; climate change communication; radical advocacy journalism; community media destinations; refugee media; community development in the Pacific; local significance in community radio; music and community radio and more.  

Presenters include: Heather Anderson (Griffith), Charlotte Bedford (Adelaide), John Budarick (Adelaide), Tanja Dreher (UNSW), Kerrie Foxwell-Norton, Anne Leitch, Bridget Backhaus (Griffith), Nicola Joseph (UNSW), Diana Kreemers (UNSW), Rochelle Lade (Swinburne), Michelle O’Connor (CSU), Poppy de Souza (UNSW), Christina Spurgeon (QUT), John Tebbutt (RMIT), Verena Thomas (QUT), and more to be confirmed.  

A full, detailed Program will be available shortly 

To register for CAMRA2021, please click here:  CAMRA 2021: a snapshot of community and alternative media research in Australia, Hosted online, 26th of February | Humanitix 

Community and Alternative Media Research Australia (CAMRA) is an informal network of researchers and practitioners working in academia and in media, with a focus on research, advocacy and activism for community and alternative media in Australia.  

For further information on CAMRA, or to join the low volume email list, please email: CAMRA2021@groups.griffith.edu.au  

CAMRA 2021 is convened by Tanja Dreher (Media Futures Hub, UNSW), Heather Anderson and Bridget Backhaus (Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University)  

DRONE CULTURES SYMPOSIUM, 8-10 DECEMBER 2020

This three-day symposium brings together academics, artists and researchers to explore drone cultures from multiple perspectives and practices with the aim of generating dialogue across disciplinary boundaries to better understand the diversity of drones and drone cultures. How has drone vision influenced contemporary visual culture? How do practices, aesthetics, techniques and technologies move back and forth between military and non-military contexts? How have artists, writers and filmmakers critiqued, adopted and innovated drone technologies? How have drones changed how power is exercised and experienced? What cultures have sprung up around drones in conservation, activism, amateur photography and other contexts? How are drones and other remote sensing systems shaping and shaped by our desires and imaginaries? What does the proliferation of drones mean for the future of the human?

KEYNOTE: Caren Kaplan, UC Davis

PLENARY: Alex Edney-Browne, Melbourne

ARTISTS & ACADEMICS: Christine Agius (Swinburne), Michele Barker (UNSW), David Beesley (RMIT), Olga Boichak (USyd), Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox (Curtin), David Chesworth (RMIT), Sarah Eleazar (UT Austin), Adam Fish (UNSW), Jack Faber (Uniarts Helsinki), Edgar Gómez Cruz (UNSW), Jennifer Smith-Mayo (Maine), Mitch Goodwin (Melbourne), Kathrin Maurer (Southern Denmark), Anna Munster (UNSW), Tom Sear (UNSW Canberra), Kate Richards (WSU), James Rogers (Southern Denmark), Simon M. Taylor (UNSW), Yanai Toister (Tel Aviv), Madelene Veber (UNSW), Vaughan Wozniak-O'Connor (UNSW), Anne Wilson (Deakin), Andrew Yip (Coventry)

REGISTER via Eventbrite

PROGRAM AND OTHER INFO at the Drone Cultures website.

DRONE FUTURES #6: MAHWISH CHISHTY, 26 NOVEMBER 2020

A virtual public seminar on “Cultural Aesthetics + Borders” with artist Mahwish Chishty.

Mahwish Chishty’s artistic research combines her interest in Pakistani traditional folk art/culture and contemporary politics as it relates to US/Pakistan relations. This talk will cover the inspiration and motivation behind the projects that Chishy has been working on since 2011, including: Drone Art series, Wagah Border, Basant: Let’s Go Fly a Kite and Danyore. Chishty will share paintings, installations and collaborative projects as part of this discussion.

Mahwish Chishty is a multimedia artist who initially trained as a miniature painter in Pakistan. Her work combines traditional artistic practice with her interest in contemporary politics, particularly the relationship between the US and Pakistan. In 2017, Chishty was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in the same year she held a solo exhibition of her drone art at the Imperial War Museum, London. Her 2018 installation, Naming the Dead, was shortlisted for the ArtPrize. She is currently Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Image: X-47B (2012)

When: Thursday November 26, 10 - 11.30am (AEDT)

Where: YouTube Live

REGISTER HERE

DRONE FUTURES #5: THOMAS STUBBLEFIELD, 4 November 2020

A virtual public seminar on “The Ornithology of Drone Art” with Thomas Stubblefield (UMass Dartmouth).

As a result of the historical reliance of war upon the animal body, modern military technologies such as the drone are haunted by a lingering zoological presence. Of the nonhuman animals that occupy the modern drone perhaps none are as influential as birds. Not only do these creatures offer a means of materializing an enduring connection between flight and surveillance that had occupied the imaginary for centuries, but so too do they introduce an aerial proxy by which a thoroughly modern asymmetry of warfare would come into being. This presentation will discuss the ways in which the video Seagulls (2013) and the #NotABugSplat installation (2014) engage this residual animal presence in order to both excavate alternate histories of the drone and reimagine its practices of targeting.

Thomas Stubblefield is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and Media Studies and Interim Associate Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. In 2015, his book, 9/11 and the Visual Culture of Disaster (Indiana University Press), was awarded the Rollins Prize. His most recent book, Drone Art: The Everywhere War as Medium (2020), was published by the University of California Press. His essay: “Towards a History of the Medial Regime: Force and the Post-Industrial Female Body” appeared in the Winter 2020 issue of Cultural Critique (University of Minnesota Press).

When: Wednesday November 4, 10 - 11.30am (AEDT)

Where: YouTube Live

REGISTER HERE

MEDIA, RACE, VIOLENCE #4: AFTERLIVES, GHOSTS, HAUNTINGS

The Media, Race, Violence Reading Group traces the relationships between media, technology, race, and violence with the aim of understanding the role media plays both in the encoding of inequality and in resisting it. The group will engage with work from the fields of media studies, critical race theory, Indigenous studies, anti- and de-colonial theory, Black studies, cultural studies, and more.

#4: Afterlives, Ghosts, Hauntings

When: Friday November 13, 9-10:30am (and recurring the second Friday of every month)

Where: Zoom

The readings for this session consider the afterlives of slavery and colonisation, tracking the way that the histories of racial ascription continue to haunt the present. The sociologist Avery Gordon described the concept of haunting as ‘one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied (as in free labor or national security).’ This session will focus on the temporalities of racialising practices and the ways in which unresolved or repressed social violence (such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia) repeatedly and cyclically makes itself known. The readings consider how the afterlives of race are mediated and how the reproduction of racial regimes might be interrupted.

Tuck and Ree offer a glossary of terms related to the violence of colonialism and the various trauma it produces; the Karrabing Film Collective offer as a dystopian vision of the near future that considers the history of the forced removal of Aboriginal children and shows us how the past is bound up with the present; Ruha Benjamin considers the afterlives of slavery in relation to caraceral systems in the US and posits kinship as a way of intervening in the reproducing of racial injustice; and Legacy Russell develops the glitch and the void as generative figures for moving beyond the body defined by structures of domination such as the gender binary and race. Further readings provide additional context for thinking through the climate of anti-Blackness and further developing the concept of haunting.

 Themes/Objects: archives, racial legacies, afterlives of slavery and colonisation, temporality, reproduction, affective climates, incarceration, hauntings, glitches, agency

Readings for Discussion:

• Eve Tuck and C. Ree, ‘A Glossary of Haunting’, in Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony E. Adams, Carolyn Ellis (Routledge, 2013), pp. 639-658

• Karrabing Film Collective (film), The Mermaids, or Aiden In Wonderland (2018)

• Ruha Benjamin, ‘Black AfterLives Matter’, Boston Review, July 2018

• Legacy Russell, Chapter 4: ‘Glitch Ghosts’ and Chapter 6: ‘Glitch Encrypts’, from Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (Verso, 2020)

Further Reading:

• Christina Sharpe, ‘The Weather’, The New Inquiry, July 2017

• Avery Gordon, ‘her shape and his hand’, from Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2008): pp. 3-30

To join the mailing list for the reading group and receive access to copies of the texts, please contact Andrew Brooks directly.

READING GROUP: MEDIA, RACE, VIOLENCE

The Media, Race, Violence reading group meets monthly to investigates theories, methods, and practices in order to build more just futures. 

The reading group traces the relationships between media, technology, race, and violence with the aim of understanding the role media plays both in the encoding of inequality and in resisting it. 

All are welcome to join.

Contact Andrew Brooks at a.brooks@unsw.edu.au to get on the mailing list.

SCREENING OF ADAM FISH’S FILM CRASH THEORY

Revelation Perth International Film Festival and Academic Conference, Perth, Australia, Dec. 4-5, 2020.

IN THE MEDIA: Tanja Dreher

Tanja Dreher spoke to The Sydney Morning Herald’s Melanie Kembrey on cancel culture controversies.