Tara Brabazon is the Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University, Trustee of the Graduate Women Manawatu Trust, Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Director of the Popular Culture Collective.
,Just over 1% of the world's population holds a PhD. This is a tough qualification, even in benev... more ,Just over 1% of the world's population holds a PhD. This is a tough qualification, even in benevolent times. Yet the 2020s are not benevolent times. From a pandemic to a climate emergency and war, our universities are buffeted by panic, fear and crises. Restructures are common. Stability is rare.
In such a time, how can PhD students survive - and thrive? This audiobook takes the difficult states - that are often a full stop in a career, personal and professional life - such as disappointment, jealousy, narcissism and fear. These often career-ending experiences are addressed and transformed as a 'comma' state. A pause. A moment of reflection. A platform for transformation of a career and research.
The University of Google. ChatGPT. Twitter pile-ons. How do we manage chaos and crises, confusion... more The University of Google. ChatGPT. Twitter pile-ons. How do we manage chaos and crises, confusion and catastrophes? How do we understand the difference between the urgent and important, the trivial and significant?
Information literacy is about as attractive as teeth extraction. However, for PhD students and citizens more generally, information literacy enables us to sift and sort knowledge from opinion, and expertise from a vibe.
Know What You Do Not Know: Information Literacy for PhD Students provides a context around the folk devils of our time: plagiarism, self-plagiarism, influencers and populists. Most importantly, Know What You Do Not Know demonstrates how to take notes, how to reference with clarity, and how to build an opinion into a referenced and considered argument.
The doctor of philosophy is a complex degree.Ā Ā
The space between students and supervisors is ve... more The doctor of philosophy is a complex degree.Ā Ā
The space between students and supervisors is vexed and volatile.Ā Ā
It can be exploitative. The Pernicious PhD Supervisor enters this difficult space and provides both the models and the strategies to categorize and manage difficult supervisors and supervisory practices.Ā Ā
From the Flamingo to the Wizard, from the White Pointer Shark to the Bower Bird, ten models of supervision are revealed.Ā Ā
Part horror and part comedy, this book opens the weeping wound of doctoral education, to salve and heal the consequences of problematic research cultures.
, (Bingley: Emerald, 2020) Written with Tiffany Lyndall Knight and Natalie Hills (eBook, paperba... more , (Bingley: Emerald, 2020) Written with Tiffany Lyndall Knight and Natalie Hills (eBook, paperback and audiobook)
Why do citizens vote against their own best interest?
Trump Studies addresses this key question;... more Why do citizens vote against their own best interest?
Trump Studies addresses this key question; probing the value of thinking, reading, writing and interpretation during times of economic, social and political uncertainty. With a compelling voice and academic rigour, the authors explore how and why xenophobia and sexism are the grammar of contemporary popular culture and politics.
The Brexit result and the Trump victory cannot be studied in a laboratory; the silent majority will not sit in a petri dish, waiting to be researched. The theories and methodologies developed into this book not only explain these two mega and meta events, they create space for ideas that challenge and dissent, and make the case for the role and value of universities in a time when evidence, expertise and facts often dissolve into opinion, emotion and fake news.
Donald Trump does not matter. Trump Studies does matter - and this is a siren call to all intellectuals to intervene and transform the currency of theory in empiricist times.
This work takes the most recent, interdisciplinary research and demonstrates how to make higher e... more This work takes the most recent, interdisciplinary research and demonstrates how to make higher education institutions open, accessible and socially just for staff and students with disabilities. Combining the scholarly fields of media platform management, information literacy, internet studies, mobility studies and disability studies, this book offers a guide and method to consider how students and staff with differing needs move through university processes, spaces and interfaces. It captures the challenges and potentials of both the online and offline university. The key concept of the book is universal design. This term and theory is used to move beyond the medical and social model of disability that disconnect and separate the issues of disability and impairment from core societal concerns. This book confirms that most of us will be touched by impairment through our lives. When matched with the necessity to retrain and gain new skills for a post-recession future, there must be a renewed commitment to not only the widening participation agenda of higher education, but also the enabling of universities for men and women with impairments.
This book investigates small cities - cities and towns that are not well known or internationally... more This book investigates small cities - cities and towns that are not well known or internationally branded, but are facing structural economic and social issues after the Global Financial Crisis. They need to invent, develop and manage new reasons for their existence. The strengths and opportunities are often underplayed when compared to larger cities. These small cities do not have the profile of New York, London, Tokyo or Cairo, or second-tier cities like San Francisco, Manchester, Osaka or Alexandria. This book traces the current state of the creative industries literature after the GFC, but with a specific focus. The specific ā and worsening ā conditions in third-tier cities are logged. The social and economic challenges within these regions are great, particularly with regard to health and health services, education, employment, social mobility and physical activity. This is not a study that merely diagnoses problems but raises strategies for third-tier cities to create both a profile and growth. The current research field is synthesized to reveal how cities are defined, constituted, developed and, in many cases, suffering decline. There is an imperative to build relationships with other urban environments. The book enters these under-discussed locations and reveal the scarred layering of injustice, signified by depopulation, dis-investment, economic decline and a reduction in public services for health, transportation and education, while also developing specific and innovative models for improvement. The vista summoned in Unique Urbanity is international, with strong attention to trans-local strategies that offer wide relevance, currency and opportunities for policy makers. While third-tier cities are often hidden, marginalized, invisible or demeaned, Unique Urbanity shows that innovation, imagination and creativity can emerge in small places.
In April 2010, and for the first time, Facebook received more independent visitors than Google. ... more In April 2010, and for the first time, Facebook received more independent visitors than Google. Increasingly there is a desire to share rather than search. But what is the impact of such a change on higher education? How do teachers maintain expectations, motivations and standards in an environment of information obesity? It is understandable, when students do not complete course readings, submit substandard papers and disconnect from learning, that staff reduce their expectations. If students complain that the reading is too hard, then one response is to make it easier. If students complain that the assignments are too difficult, then one way to manage that critique is to make the assignments simpler. Both are passive responses that damage the calibre of education and universities in the long term.
We live in panicked times, not careful times. While excessive food may be the basis of a moral panic about obesity, too much information is rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously, plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and information literacy, students and citizens wade through low quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable intellectual challenge, imagination and critique. Satisfied and compliant, they are not aware that other types of information are available. The task of Digital Dieting: From information obesity to intellectual fitness is to demonstrate the social, political and scholarly difficulties in managing large quantities of low quality information. Yet this is not a book that diagnoses crisis, excess and banality. Instead, the aim is to provide strategies to develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal.
This book presents two intertwined premises to consider.
(1) Decisions about teaching and learning have been automated, blocking reflection of what, how and why particular ideas are taught in particular ways. Therefore, it is necessary to bring the consciousness and consideration back to media and information selection.
(2) Fewer media create more meaning. One way to return the consciousness and reflection to education is to not only reduce the automation but question the assumption that more media, platforms, software, hardware and applications always improves teaching and learning. Re-empowering teachers and librarians in the construction of teaching, learning, media and assessment choices will stop software and hardware, managers and administrators ignoring the importance of information and media literacies.
From these maxims, the book offers two actions to commence a digital diet. Firstly, teachers, students and citizens must reduce the automated choices made within templates, applications and search engines. Simply because software or hardware is invented does not mean it must be used. Secondly, it is important to recognize that the internet has created resources beyond what any of us could have imagined in a local library, yet the provision of information and media literacy has not increased to a similar scale to manage this proliferation.
Digital Dieting: from information obesity to intellectual fitness provides active, conscious, careful and applicable strategies, options and opportunities to move students and citizens from searching to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.
"Cities are the fodder, foundation and impetus for creative industry strategies and economic deve... more "Cities are the fodder, foundation and impetus for creative industry strategies and economic development. Richard Florida and his colleagues have studied the characteristics of successful cities through the Bohemian Index, the Diversity Index, the Creativity Index and the Technology Index. Charles Landry has moved around the world to enliven central business districts. Saskia Sassen has probed global cities. Yet integrated, contemporary studies ā post-September 11, post-credit crunch, post-faltering recovery, post-Arab Spring ā are rare.
_City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ has been edited by Professor Tara Brabazon and written by a team of experienced and innovative researchers with the aim of understanding cities as they are, rather than how they are marketed or branded. Certainly, all cities have much in common. Yet the differences are important, imaginative, marketed, promoted, mediated and transformed.
City imaging is a phrase that is increasingly used in public discourse, but it is rarely defined. It refers to how particular cities are branded and marketed. It is a theory of cities based on an assumption: representations can be transformed and sold, often for the purposes of tourism or attracting corporations and in-demand workers to one city over another. It is an imprecise science. Subjectivity, impressions, bias and prejudice floods the vista of the mind. Similarly, the visuality of a city often overwhelms the sounds, touch, taste and feel of urbanity. Different senses operate in some cities and not others. For Singapore, thick and humid air predominates. In Detroit, the greyness of industrialization ā from the historic motor plants or techno music ā saturates the visual palette.
The taste, smell, sounds and architectural iconography of a place align to construct an image of a city. The task for researchers and policy makers is to use or transform this image, to market the city as a tourist destination for music, sport, beaches or relaxation. Such a project is difficult. Words like regionality, deterritorialization, postindustrialization and decline confirm such a complexity. These words and phrases capture the panicked acceleration of contemporary life. Histories squeeze and loop. Geographies crack and morph. Yet after the war on terror, credit crunch and recession, it is necessary to quietly and patiently survey the wreckage of the 2000s.
Through fear, panic, ignorance, mobility and speed, cities matter. While the deterritorialization of the web enables the movement of money, music and ideas over national borders, cities remain important. _City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ explores the iconography of urbanity and what happens when branding is emphasized over living"
Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets tracks new modes of commun... more Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets tracks new modes of community, enabling the creation of connections, consciousness and social change. It is not a book of predictions, dreams, aspirations and digi-topia. It is not a history of convergent media. Instead, it investigates how particular platforms, portals and applications hook into daily life and build relationships beyond geographical locations or familial links.
Andersonās arguments about language, power and colonisation can be migrated to the next century. But caution is required. Since the editorās 2001 article, the web has matured. It is television with a cursor. It is a jukebox with a slot to swipe a credit card. It is a shop that delivers. It is a lover that texts commitment. But the web is also part of popular culture, weaving passion into interactivity. It has embedded into the life of millions and added further layers of exclusion and disconnection for the already disempowered. The exclusion of particular people becomes serious - more serious - when assumptions of connectivity and web literacy permeate governmental, commercial and educational institutions.
Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets enters the rapidly maturing social media environment and documents the quest ā if not the reality ā of community. It also notes that alongside every engaged, connected and supportive group are those who are excluded, marginalised, ridiculed or forgotten. The quest for authenticity for some layers injustice for others.
There is productive research to be completed in this moment of transformation. The writers in this collection probe the concept of community when it is imagined and imagining, disconnected from physical territory. Particularly, there is attention ā recognising the events in the Middle East in early 2011 ā on how social media creates political consciousness and how this consciousness manifests into social change both on and offline. The goal is not to segregate digital and analogue spaces and identities, but to look for productive, imaginative and creative relationships between these spheres.
The contributors enter digital microenvironments to explore the desires for connection and communication. They explore the quest for authenticity. Our task is to probe how technology redraws the boundaries between connection, consciousness and community. Put more clearly, and summoning one of the fathers of cultural studies, we test Raymond Williamsā maxim that, āthe process of communication is in fact the process of community.ā We do not assume that a community (inevitably) emerges from communication. We do not assume political change evolves from consciousness. Instead, the researchers in this collection open new spaces for thinking about language, identity and social connections.
This is a post-iPod popular music book. It not only investigates the impact of digitization, but ... more This is a post-iPod popular music book. It not only investigates the impact of digitization, but the new audiences created through the mobility of music.
Thinking Popular Culture investigates how popular culture has been transformed in decade since Se... more Thinking Popular Culture investigates how popular culture has been transformed in decade since September 11. It also explores the role and function of cultural journalism and academic writing in tracking social change.
The revolution will not be downloaded offers a series of case studies about how social change is ... more The revolution will not be downloaded offers a series of case studies about how social change is enacted on and offline. There is attention to older citizens, international studies, downloading communities and fans.
What happens when decisions about information are automated? What are the consequences of search... more What happens when decisions about information are automated? What are the consequences of search engines on reading, writing and thinking? The University of Google explores how teaching and learning changes through simplifying research into a search.
Playing on the Periphery is an exploration of the edges of the modern sports experience. The book... more Playing on the Periphery is an exploration of the edges of the modern sports experience. The book examines how the cultural content of sports that were once the embodiment of Englishness have been reinterpreted by the former empire and re-presented in new media environments.
,Just over 1% of the world's population holds a PhD. This is a tough qualification, even in benev... more ,Just over 1% of the world's population holds a PhD. This is a tough qualification, even in benevolent times. Yet the 2020s are not benevolent times. From a pandemic to a climate emergency and war, our universities are buffeted by panic, fear and crises. Restructures are common. Stability is rare.
In such a time, how can PhD students survive - and thrive? This audiobook takes the difficult states - that are often a full stop in a career, personal and professional life - such as disappointment, jealousy, narcissism and fear. These often career-ending experiences are addressed and transformed as a 'comma' state. A pause. A moment of reflection. A platform for transformation of a career and research.
The University of Google. ChatGPT. Twitter pile-ons. How do we manage chaos and crises, confusion... more The University of Google. ChatGPT. Twitter pile-ons. How do we manage chaos and crises, confusion and catastrophes? How do we understand the difference between the urgent and important, the trivial and significant?
Information literacy is about as attractive as teeth extraction. However, for PhD students and citizens more generally, information literacy enables us to sift and sort knowledge from opinion, and expertise from a vibe.
Know What You Do Not Know: Information Literacy for PhD Students provides a context around the folk devils of our time: plagiarism, self-plagiarism, influencers and populists. Most importantly, Know What You Do Not Know demonstrates how to take notes, how to reference with clarity, and how to build an opinion into a referenced and considered argument.
The doctor of philosophy is a complex degree.Ā Ā
The space between students and supervisors is ve... more The doctor of philosophy is a complex degree.Ā Ā
The space between students and supervisors is vexed and volatile.Ā Ā
It can be exploitative. The Pernicious PhD Supervisor enters this difficult space and provides both the models and the strategies to categorize and manage difficult supervisors and supervisory practices.Ā Ā
From the Flamingo to the Wizard, from the White Pointer Shark to the Bower Bird, ten models of supervision are revealed.Ā Ā
Part horror and part comedy, this book opens the weeping wound of doctoral education, to salve and heal the consequences of problematic research cultures.
, (Bingley: Emerald, 2020) Written with Tiffany Lyndall Knight and Natalie Hills (eBook, paperba... more , (Bingley: Emerald, 2020) Written with Tiffany Lyndall Knight and Natalie Hills (eBook, paperback and audiobook)
Why do citizens vote against their own best interest?
Trump Studies addresses this key question;... more Why do citizens vote against their own best interest?
Trump Studies addresses this key question; probing the value of thinking, reading, writing and interpretation during times of economic, social and political uncertainty. With a compelling voice and academic rigour, the authors explore how and why xenophobia and sexism are the grammar of contemporary popular culture and politics.
The Brexit result and the Trump victory cannot be studied in a laboratory; the silent majority will not sit in a petri dish, waiting to be researched. The theories and methodologies developed into this book not only explain these two mega and meta events, they create space for ideas that challenge and dissent, and make the case for the role and value of universities in a time when evidence, expertise and facts often dissolve into opinion, emotion and fake news.
Donald Trump does not matter. Trump Studies does matter - and this is a siren call to all intellectuals to intervene and transform the currency of theory in empiricist times.
This work takes the most recent, interdisciplinary research and demonstrates how to make higher e... more This work takes the most recent, interdisciplinary research and demonstrates how to make higher education institutions open, accessible and socially just for staff and students with disabilities. Combining the scholarly fields of media platform management, information literacy, internet studies, mobility studies and disability studies, this book offers a guide and method to consider how students and staff with differing needs move through university processes, spaces and interfaces. It captures the challenges and potentials of both the online and offline university. The key concept of the book is universal design. This term and theory is used to move beyond the medical and social model of disability that disconnect and separate the issues of disability and impairment from core societal concerns. This book confirms that most of us will be touched by impairment through our lives. When matched with the necessity to retrain and gain new skills for a post-recession future, there must be a renewed commitment to not only the widening participation agenda of higher education, but also the enabling of universities for men and women with impairments.
This book investigates small cities - cities and towns that are not well known or internationally... more This book investigates small cities - cities and towns that are not well known or internationally branded, but are facing structural economic and social issues after the Global Financial Crisis. They need to invent, develop and manage new reasons for their existence. The strengths and opportunities are often underplayed when compared to larger cities. These small cities do not have the profile of New York, London, Tokyo or Cairo, or second-tier cities like San Francisco, Manchester, Osaka or Alexandria. This book traces the current state of the creative industries literature after the GFC, but with a specific focus. The specific ā and worsening ā conditions in third-tier cities are logged. The social and economic challenges within these regions are great, particularly with regard to health and health services, education, employment, social mobility and physical activity. This is not a study that merely diagnoses problems but raises strategies for third-tier cities to create both a profile and growth. The current research field is synthesized to reveal how cities are defined, constituted, developed and, in many cases, suffering decline. There is an imperative to build relationships with other urban environments. The book enters these under-discussed locations and reveal the scarred layering of injustice, signified by depopulation, dis-investment, economic decline and a reduction in public services for health, transportation and education, while also developing specific and innovative models for improvement. The vista summoned in Unique Urbanity is international, with strong attention to trans-local strategies that offer wide relevance, currency and opportunities for policy makers. While third-tier cities are often hidden, marginalized, invisible or demeaned, Unique Urbanity shows that innovation, imagination and creativity can emerge in small places.
In April 2010, and for the first time, Facebook received more independent visitors than Google. ... more In April 2010, and for the first time, Facebook received more independent visitors than Google. Increasingly there is a desire to share rather than search. But what is the impact of such a change on higher education? How do teachers maintain expectations, motivations and standards in an environment of information obesity? It is understandable, when students do not complete course readings, submit substandard papers and disconnect from learning, that staff reduce their expectations. If students complain that the reading is too hard, then one response is to make it easier. If students complain that the assignments are too difficult, then one way to manage that critique is to make the assignments simpler. Both are passive responses that damage the calibre of education and universities in the long term.
We live in panicked times, not careful times. While excessive food may be the basis of a moral panic about obesity, too much information is rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously, plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and information literacy, students and citizens wade through low quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable intellectual challenge, imagination and critique. Satisfied and compliant, they are not aware that other types of information are available. The task of Digital Dieting: From information obesity to intellectual fitness is to demonstrate the social, political and scholarly difficulties in managing large quantities of low quality information. Yet this is not a book that diagnoses crisis, excess and banality. Instead, the aim is to provide strategies to develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal.
This book presents two intertwined premises to consider.
(1) Decisions about teaching and learning have been automated, blocking reflection of what, how and why particular ideas are taught in particular ways. Therefore, it is necessary to bring the consciousness and consideration back to media and information selection.
(2) Fewer media create more meaning. One way to return the consciousness and reflection to education is to not only reduce the automation but question the assumption that more media, platforms, software, hardware and applications always improves teaching and learning. Re-empowering teachers and librarians in the construction of teaching, learning, media and assessment choices will stop software and hardware, managers and administrators ignoring the importance of information and media literacies.
From these maxims, the book offers two actions to commence a digital diet. Firstly, teachers, students and citizens must reduce the automated choices made within templates, applications and search engines. Simply because software or hardware is invented does not mean it must be used. Secondly, it is important to recognize that the internet has created resources beyond what any of us could have imagined in a local library, yet the provision of information and media literacy has not increased to a similar scale to manage this proliferation.
Digital Dieting: from information obesity to intellectual fitness provides active, conscious, careful and applicable strategies, options and opportunities to move students and citizens from searching to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.
"Cities are the fodder, foundation and impetus for creative industry strategies and economic deve... more "Cities are the fodder, foundation and impetus for creative industry strategies and economic development. Richard Florida and his colleagues have studied the characteristics of successful cities through the Bohemian Index, the Diversity Index, the Creativity Index and the Technology Index. Charles Landry has moved around the world to enliven central business districts. Saskia Sassen has probed global cities. Yet integrated, contemporary studies ā post-September 11, post-credit crunch, post-faltering recovery, post-Arab Spring ā are rare.
_City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ has been edited by Professor Tara Brabazon and written by a team of experienced and innovative researchers with the aim of understanding cities as they are, rather than how they are marketed or branded. Certainly, all cities have much in common. Yet the differences are important, imaginative, marketed, promoted, mediated and transformed.
City imaging is a phrase that is increasingly used in public discourse, but it is rarely defined. It refers to how particular cities are branded and marketed. It is a theory of cities based on an assumption: representations can be transformed and sold, often for the purposes of tourism or attracting corporations and in-demand workers to one city over another. It is an imprecise science. Subjectivity, impressions, bias and prejudice floods the vista of the mind. Similarly, the visuality of a city often overwhelms the sounds, touch, taste and feel of urbanity. Different senses operate in some cities and not others. For Singapore, thick and humid air predominates. In Detroit, the greyness of industrialization ā from the historic motor plants or techno music ā saturates the visual palette.
The taste, smell, sounds and architectural iconography of a place align to construct an image of a city. The task for researchers and policy makers is to use or transform this image, to market the city as a tourist destination for music, sport, beaches or relaxation. Such a project is difficult. Words like regionality, deterritorialization, postindustrialization and decline confirm such a complexity. These words and phrases capture the panicked acceleration of contemporary life. Histories squeeze and loop. Geographies crack and morph. Yet after the war on terror, credit crunch and recession, it is necessary to quietly and patiently survey the wreckage of the 2000s.
Through fear, panic, ignorance, mobility and speed, cities matter. While the deterritorialization of the web enables the movement of money, music and ideas over national borders, cities remain important. _City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ explores the iconography of urbanity and what happens when branding is emphasized over living"
Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets tracks new modes of commun... more Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets tracks new modes of community, enabling the creation of connections, consciousness and social change. It is not a book of predictions, dreams, aspirations and digi-topia. It is not a history of convergent media. Instead, it investigates how particular platforms, portals and applications hook into daily life and build relationships beyond geographical locations or familial links.
Andersonās arguments about language, power and colonisation can be migrated to the next century. But caution is required. Since the editorās 2001 article, the web has matured. It is television with a cursor. It is a jukebox with a slot to swipe a credit card. It is a shop that delivers. It is a lover that texts commitment. But the web is also part of popular culture, weaving passion into interactivity. It has embedded into the life of millions and added further layers of exclusion and disconnection for the already disempowered. The exclusion of particular people becomes serious - more serious - when assumptions of connectivity and web literacy permeate governmental, commercial and educational institutions.
Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets enters the rapidly maturing social media environment and documents the quest ā if not the reality ā of community. It also notes that alongside every engaged, connected and supportive group are those who are excluded, marginalised, ridiculed or forgotten. The quest for authenticity for some layers injustice for others.
There is productive research to be completed in this moment of transformation. The writers in this collection probe the concept of community when it is imagined and imagining, disconnected from physical territory. Particularly, there is attention ā recognising the events in the Middle East in early 2011 ā on how social media creates political consciousness and how this consciousness manifests into social change both on and offline. The goal is not to segregate digital and analogue spaces and identities, but to look for productive, imaginative and creative relationships between these spheres.
The contributors enter digital microenvironments to explore the desires for connection and communication. They explore the quest for authenticity. Our task is to probe how technology redraws the boundaries between connection, consciousness and community. Put more clearly, and summoning one of the fathers of cultural studies, we test Raymond Williamsā maxim that, āthe process of communication is in fact the process of community.ā We do not assume that a community (inevitably) emerges from communication. We do not assume political change evolves from consciousness. Instead, the researchers in this collection open new spaces for thinking about language, identity and social connections.
This is a post-iPod popular music book. It not only investigates the impact of digitization, but ... more This is a post-iPod popular music book. It not only investigates the impact of digitization, but the new audiences created through the mobility of music.
Thinking Popular Culture investigates how popular culture has been transformed in decade since Se... more Thinking Popular Culture investigates how popular culture has been transformed in decade since September 11. It also explores the role and function of cultural journalism and academic writing in tracking social change.
The revolution will not be downloaded offers a series of case studies about how social change is ... more The revolution will not be downloaded offers a series of case studies about how social change is enacted on and offline. There is attention to older citizens, international studies, downloading communities and fans.
What happens when decisions about information are automated? What are the consequences of search... more What happens when decisions about information are automated? What are the consequences of search engines on reading, writing and thinking? The University of Google explores how teaching and learning changes through simplifying research into a search.
Playing on the Periphery is an exploration of the edges of the modern sports experience. The book... more Playing on the Periphery is an exploration of the edges of the modern sports experience. The book examines how the cultural content of sports that were once the embodiment of Englishness have been reinterpreted by the former empire and re-presented in new media environments.
The (higher) education of women is a pinball in the arcade game of contemporary masculinity. Andr... more The (higher) education of women is a pinball in the arcade game of contemporary masculinity. Andrew Tate, while proclaiming the irrelevance of university degrees, has deployed their nomenclature through his Facebook page, titled the Tate University. One of his 'courses' was described as a PhD (Pimpin' Hoes Degree). Why is the education of women discredited, yet the vocabulary of education appropriated and activated to build the 'alpha male'? This article does not (only) investigate Andrew Tate, alpha culture or the black pill ideology. It explores why the higher education of women-and university-educated women-is a focus of sustained, brutalizing name calling and abuse in the manosphere.
QR Codes are a good fit for almost any product, but for wine they have a particular benefit. When... more QR Codes are a good fit for almost any product, but for wine they have a particular benefit. When buying a bottle of wine, many consumers do not simply buy the product on the shelf for its particular use; they buy its heritage. Importantly, considering the arguments made in our last sections about matching the correct platform with the appropriate information and the precise audience, these ācustomersā or āpeopleā who purchase wine must be carefully located and analyzed.
The Gartner research presented at the end of the Chap. 2 suggests that QR Codes are an applicatio... more The Gartner research presented at the end of the Chap. 2 suggests that QR Codes are an application that is still looking for a function. Clearly, these functions are tethered to the proliferation of Internet-connected smartphones. Every new smartphone either comes with, or can easily download at no cost, one or more applications that scan, decode, and fulfill the instructions of a QR Code.
QR Codes are an innovative extension of the standard barcode found on almost every manufactured p... more QR Codes are an innovative extension of the standard barcode found on almost every manufactured product on the planet, as well as on foods, books and tickets. There are key differences that will be revealed through this chapter. But the most important advantage is that the QR Code can carry more information in a smaller space, because they can be read vertically and horizontally. Further, they can be read at multiple angles, with the algorithm used to create them enabling a higher margin of error (between 7 and 30 %).
Tara's keynote for VALA 2024 is titled Trumped Literacies: A new model for information and knowl... more Tara's keynote for VALA 2024 is titled Trumped Literacies: A new model for information and knowledge in claustropolitan times.
Tara deploys city imaging strategies, methods and tropes to understand small cities and large tow... more Tara deploys city imaging strategies, methods and tropes to understand small cities and large towns. How do we manage the distinctiveness and deep structural challenges of these places located at the edge of urbanity?
Tara returns to Paul Willis and his landmark educational monograph, Learning to Labour. Willis f... more Tara returns to Paul Willis and his landmark educational monograph, Learning to Labour. Willis found from his study that the āladsā in his school-based ethnographic research project āresistedā learning via truanting, swearing and smoking. However their āresistanceā to learning was futile. They did not succeed in school and they replicated the patterns of their parents. They were learning to labour. Tara asks if text messaging, abuse of teachers on Facebook and aimless googling are new forms of digital āresistanceā to education. But like Willis, Tara probes if these behaviours, patterns and practices are blocking learning, teaching and education.
Tara talks with principals from regional New South Wales, Australia about how to move beyond 'man... more Tara talks with principals from regional New South Wales, Australia about how to move beyond 'managing' crisis. Instead, she demonstrates the strengths of teacher education in the suite of higher education qualifications.
It is polite to state that we live in an āinformation age.ā But such a phrase is like describing... more It is polite to state that we live in an āinformation age.ā But such a phrase is like describing the Leveson Inquiry as a polite afternoon chat about the weather.
Actually, we live in an age of information obesity. Text messages. Tweets. Facebook updates. LinkedIn contacts. Emails. These digital interruptions are the punctuation of our analogue life. In such an environment, teaching and learning - curriculum and assessment - lurches from one āinnovationā to the next, often without reflection, consideration or respect for history, professionalism or educational outcomes.
My keynote address enters this supermarket of digital excess. We probe information obesity. But then, we enter a digital detox and conclude with digital dieting. The goal is to find the most potent and powerful assessment that develops learning, literacy and cultware, rather than frustration, interruption and software.
Tara will be delivering a Keynote Address at the 5th International Plagiarism Conference at The S... more Tara will be delivering a Keynote Address at the 5th International Plagiarism Conference at The Sage at Gateshead on Wednesday July 18, 2012. The speech is titled "Turnitin? Turnitoff... How to migrate from software to wetware." She will be exploring the consequences of 'deskilling' teaching and learning, particularly with regard to the 'detection' of plagiarism. Tara is particularly interested in finding new and positive solutions to the development of imagination, innovation and creativity from both students and teachers.
Tara talks with Dr Kevin Moore about the National Football Museum. Kevin reflects on the nature ... more Tara talks with Dr Kevin Moore about the National Football Museum. Kevin reflects on the nature of sport studies and museum studies, particularly through Brexit. Popular culture remains a key area of future study and attention in the contemporary museum.
Doctor Who is a stunning and innovative force in popular culture and popular memory. But why is ... more Doctor Who is a stunning and innovative force in popular culture and popular memory. But why is Doctor Who popular and what is the role of Peter Capaldi in aligning past and present, memory and politics, television and post-television? Steve Redhead and Tara Brabazontalk about Doctor Who through its history and why this programme matters now, perhaps more than at any point in its history.
Leanne McRae interviews Tara about her career in universities, and beyond. Leanne is interested ... more Leanne McRae interviews Tara about her career in universities, and beyond. Leanne is interested in the past, present and future of cultural studies and her questions probe the effectiveness of this paradigm in a tough era for higher education.
Ashgate have nominated Tara Brabazon's Digital Dieting as one of the books that have impacted on ... more Ashgate have nominated Tara Brabazon's Digital Dieting as one of the books that have impacted on the field. This podcast discusses how the book was written, the role of interdisciplinarity and its audience.
Tara Brabazon talks with Steve Redhead about Jean Baudrillard. The 'postmodern' label applied to... more Tara Brabazon talks with Steve Redhead about Jean Baudrillard. The 'postmodern' label applied to Baudrillard has underplayed his complexity and role in the contemporary academy.
Slavoj Zizek is much more than a Slovenian Marxist philosopher. Steve Redhead and Tara Brabazon ... more Slavoj Zizek is much more than a Slovenian Marxist philosopher. Steve Redhead and Tara Brabazon talk about why his theorizations of culture and politics have been so powerful and so popular.
Can we think about decolonizing the curriculum through post-humanism? Tara talks with umar umang... more Can we think about decolonizing the curriculum through post-humanism? Tara talks with umar umangay about bodies, embodiment, spirit and vision, offering a strategy to think about teacher education through an innovative and interventionist frame.
Tara talks with umar umangay, from the School of Teacher Education's Burlington campus of Charles... more Tara talks with umar umangay, from the School of Teacher Education's Burlington campus of Charles Sturt University. They discuss the role and function of postcolonialism in teacher education, with the goal and imperative to decolonize the curriculum.
Tara offers ten tips to assist postgraduate students about to enter the oral examination for thei... more Tara offers ten tips to assist postgraduate students about to enter the oral examination for their PhD.
Rural education is often neglected and frequently invisible, being marginalized by the seemingly ... more Rural education is often neglected and frequently invisible, being marginalized by the seemingly urgent and volatile conditions within urban environments. Tara Brabazon talks with Dr Kathryn Edgeworth about her research and teaching practice in rural education. They explore the impact of this neglect of the rural, and the transformative capacity of migrants in teaching and learning.
Tara introduces Professor Steve Redhead's innovative assessment protocol for legal studies. Steve... more Tara introduces Professor Steve Redhead's innovative assessment protocol for legal studies. Steve discusses the potential of cascading assessment for upper-level undergraduate students to enable research training.
Tara explores both how academics write journalism but also the genre of 'academic journalism.' W... more Tara explores both how academics write journalism but also the genre of 'academic journalism.' What are the strengths and challenges of academics engaging in new modes and modalities of writing?
Research dissemination is a pivotal issue for PhD students, early career researchers and scholars... more Research dissemination is a pivotal issue for PhD students, early career researchers and scholars. The transformations to commercial publishing means that "author processing fees" have become a controversial phrase and issue. Tara introduces the Open Access Movement and its capacity to transform and expand the research trajectory of scholarship. Tara offers strategies and models to enable open access publishing, and how to mix commercial and open access publications.
Tara Brabazon's Raven SPM Plus Results. Rave SPM Plus is a mental ability test that requires the... more Tara Brabazon's Raven SPM Plus Results. Rave SPM Plus is a mental ability test that requires the solution of problems. The SPM Plus score can be used as one indication of a person's leadership potential and capacity.
Faculty of Health Professional Development on the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, 2023
A professional development session on the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research... more A professional development session on the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research for the Faculty of Health.
FAS Training Package for the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research , 2023
This is the training package for the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. Th... more This is the training package for the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. This document is for the Faculty of Arts and Society.
Senior Executive Training Package for the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research, 2023
The training package on the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research for the Senio... more The training package on the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research for the Senior Executive.
The Faculty of Science and Technology Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research Training, 2023
This is the Flipped training session for the Faculty of Science and Technology. The focus is the... more This is the Flipped training session for the Faculty of Science and Technology. The focus is the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research.
This flipped training session enables higher degree students to research, write and publish with ... more This flipped training session enables higher degree students to research, write and publish with integrity.
How to Write a Book Proposal - Start Questions for the Flipped Workshop, 2024
For this professional development programme at CDU, this PowerPoint presentation provides the sta... more For this professional development programme at CDU, this PowerPoint presentation provides the starter questions for our discussion.
This is the Faculty-wide First Year Course taught to students in Photography and Creative Media a... more This is the Faculty-wide First Year Course taught to students in Photography and Creative Media at the University of Bolton.
Tara refers to two shapes in her Vlog 102 - the Digital Doctorate. These shapes are presented in... more Tara refers to two shapes in her Vlog 102 - the Digital Doctorate. These shapes are presented in this handout.
Effective Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Course, as part of Tara Brabazon's Teaching A... more Effective Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Course, as part of Tara Brabazon's Teaching Apprenticeship at teh University of Western Australia.
In this Specialization, learners developed and honed their management coaching skills, including ... more In this Specialization, learners developed and honed their management coaching skills, including establishing accountability, assessing performance, and holding coaching conversations that build awareness and get results. Learners completed a Capstone Project at the end of the Specialization, apply their new knowledge and skills to create their own performance coaching practice.
Five courses were completed: Managing as a Coach, Setting Expectations & Assessing Performance Issues, Coaching Practices, Coaching Conversations, Designing and Implementing Your Coaching Strategy.
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Books by Tara Brabazon
In such a time, how can PhD students survive - and thrive? This audiobook takes the difficult states - that are often a full stop in a career, personal and professional life - such as disappointment, jealousy, narcissism and fear. These often career-ending experiences are addressed and transformed as a 'comma' state. A pause. A moment of reflection. A platform for transformation of a career and research.
Information literacy is about as attractive as teeth extraction. However, for PhD students and citizens more generally, information literacy enables us to sift and sort knowledge from opinion, and expertise from a vibe.
Know What You Do Not Know: Information Literacy for PhD Students provides a context around the folk devils of our time: plagiarism, self-plagiarism, influencers and populists. Most importantly, Know What You Do Not Know demonstrates how to take notes, how to reference with clarity, and how to build an opinion into a referenced and considered argument.
The space between students and supervisors is vexed and volatile.Ā Ā
It can be exploitative. The Pernicious PhD Supervisor enters this difficult space and provides both the models and the strategies to categorize and manage difficult supervisors and supervisory practices.Ā Ā
From the Flamingo to the Wizard, from the White Pointer Shark to the Bower Bird, ten models of supervision are revealed.Ā Ā
Part horror and part comedy, this book opens the weeping wound of doctoral education, to salve and heal the consequences of problematic research cultures.
Trump Studies addresses this key question; probing the value of thinking, reading, writing and interpretation during times of economic, social and political uncertainty. With a compelling voice and academic rigour, the authors explore how and why xenophobia and sexism are the grammar of contemporary popular culture and politics.
The Brexit result and the Trump victory cannot be studied in a laboratory; the silent majority will not sit in a petri dish, waiting to be researched. The theories and methodologies developed into this book not only explain these two mega and meta events, they create space for ideas that challenge and dissent, and make the case for the role and value of universities in a time when evidence, expertise and facts often dissolve into opinion, emotion and fake news.
Donald Trump does not matter. Trump Studies does matter - and this is a siren call to all intellectuals to intervene and transform the currency of theory in empiricist times.
We live in panicked times, not careful times. While excessive food may be the basis of a moral panic about obesity, too much information is rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously, plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and information literacy, students and citizens wade through low quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable intellectual challenge, imagination and critique. Satisfied and compliant, they are not aware that other types of information are available. The task of Digital Dieting: From information obesity to intellectual fitness is to demonstrate the social, political and scholarly difficulties in managing large quantities of low quality information. Yet this is not a book that diagnoses crisis, excess and banality. Instead, the aim is to provide strategies to develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal.
This book presents two intertwined premises to consider.
(1) Decisions about teaching and learning have been automated, blocking reflection of what, how and why particular ideas are taught in particular ways. Therefore, it is necessary to bring the consciousness and consideration back to media and information selection.
(2) Fewer media create more meaning. One way to return the consciousness and reflection to education is to not only reduce the automation but question the assumption that more media, platforms, software, hardware and applications always improves teaching and learning. Re-empowering teachers and librarians in the construction of teaching, learning, media and assessment choices will stop software and hardware, managers and administrators ignoring the importance of information and media literacies.
From these maxims, the book offers two actions to commence a digital diet. Firstly, teachers, students and citizens must reduce the automated choices made within templates, applications and search engines. Simply because software or hardware is invented does not mean it must be used. Secondly, it is important to recognize that the internet has created resources beyond what any of us could have imagined in a local library, yet the provision of information and media literacy has not increased to a similar scale to manage this proliferation.
Digital Dieting: from information obesity to intellectual fitness provides active, conscious, careful and applicable strategies, options and opportunities to move students and citizens from searching to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.
_City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ has been edited by Professor Tara Brabazon and written by a team of experienced and innovative researchers with the aim of understanding cities as they are, rather than how they are marketed or branded. Certainly, all cities have much in common. Yet the differences are important, imaginative, marketed, promoted, mediated and transformed.
City imaging is a phrase that is increasingly used in public discourse, but it is rarely defined. It refers to how particular cities are branded and marketed. It is a theory of cities based on an assumption: representations can be transformed and sold, often for the purposes of tourism or attracting corporations and in-demand workers to one city over another. It is an imprecise science. Subjectivity, impressions, bias and prejudice floods the vista of the mind. Similarly, the visuality of a city often overwhelms the sounds, touch, taste and feel of urbanity. Different senses operate in some cities and not others. For Singapore, thick and humid air predominates. In Detroit, the greyness of industrialization ā from the historic motor plants or techno music ā saturates the visual palette.
The taste, smell, sounds and architectural iconography of a place align to construct an image of a city. The task for researchers and policy makers is to use or transform this image, to market the city as a tourist destination for music, sport, beaches or relaxation. Such a project is difficult. Words like regionality, deterritorialization, postindustrialization and decline confirm such a complexity. These words and phrases capture the panicked acceleration of contemporary life. Histories squeeze and loop. Geographies crack and morph. Yet after the war on terror, credit crunch and recession, it is necessary to quietly and patiently survey the wreckage of the 2000s.
Through fear, panic, ignorance, mobility and speed, cities matter. While the deterritorialization of the web enables the movement of money, music and ideas over national borders, cities remain important. _City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ explores the iconography of urbanity and what happens when branding is emphasized over living"
It is timely for such a monograph. In August 2001, Tara Brabazon, the editor of this book, published an academic article titled āHow imagined are virtual communities?ā The date is important. This was a key period of transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Cutting through these clichĆ©s, the article emerged just as the read-write web entered popular cultural currency. At that time, most consumers of websites were not producers. Most online activities were searching, reading and viewing, rather than commenting, writing and uploading. This article sketched provisional theoretical work on how Benedict Andersonās landmark monograph Imagined Communities could be translated into the burgeoning web environment. Anderson, in reviewing how formerly colonised people āinventedā nations to resist, reclaim and reinvigorate the languages, traditions and histories smashed by the colonisers, summoned the phrase Imagined Communities. He showed how arbitrary ā yet integral ā these imaginings became in creating and reinforcing moments and monuments of resistance and challenge.
Andersonās arguments about language, power and colonisation can be migrated to the next century. But caution is required. Since the editorās 2001 article, the web has matured. It is television with a cursor. It is a jukebox with a slot to swipe a credit card. It is a shop that delivers. It is a lover that texts commitment. But the web is also part of popular culture, weaving passion into interactivity. It has embedded into the life of millions and added further layers of exclusion and disconnection for the already disempowered. The exclusion of particular people becomes serious - more serious - when assumptions of connectivity and web literacy permeate governmental, commercial and educational institutions.
Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets enters the rapidly maturing social media environment and documents the quest ā if not the reality ā of community. It also notes that alongside every engaged, connected and supportive group are those who are excluded, marginalised, ridiculed or forgotten. The quest for authenticity for some layers injustice for others.
There is productive research to be completed in this moment of transformation. The writers in this collection probe the concept of community when it is imagined and imagining, disconnected from physical territory. Particularly, there is attention ā recognising the events in the Middle East in early 2011 ā on how social media creates political consciousness and how this consciousness manifests into social change both on and offline. The goal is not to segregate digital and analogue spaces and identities, but to look for productive, imaginative and creative relationships between these spheres.
The contributors enter digital microenvironments to explore the desires for connection and communication. They explore the quest for authenticity. Our task is to probe how technology redraws the boundaries between connection, consciousness and community. Put more clearly, and summoning one of the fathers of cultural studies, we test Raymond Williamsā maxim that, āthe process of communication is in fact the process of community.ā We do not assume that a community (inevitably) emerges from communication. We do not assume political change evolves from consciousness. Instead, the researchers in this collection open new spaces for thinking about language, identity and social connections.
A review of this book from Dancecult is available at: http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/135/183
In such a time, how can PhD students survive - and thrive? This audiobook takes the difficult states - that are often a full stop in a career, personal and professional life - such as disappointment, jealousy, narcissism and fear. These often career-ending experiences are addressed and transformed as a 'comma' state. A pause. A moment of reflection. A platform for transformation of a career and research.
Information literacy is about as attractive as teeth extraction. However, for PhD students and citizens more generally, information literacy enables us to sift and sort knowledge from opinion, and expertise from a vibe.
Know What You Do Not Know: Information Literacy for PhD Students provides a context around the folk devils of our time: plagiarism, self-plagiarism, influencers and populists. Most importantly, Know What You Do Not Know demonstrates how to take notes, how to reference with clarity, and how to build an opinion into a referenced and considered argument.
The space between students and supervisors is vexed and volatile.Ā Ā
It can be exploitative. The Pernicious PhD Supervisor enters this difficult space and provides both the models and the strategies to categorize and manage difficult supervisors and supervisory practices.Ā Ā
From the Flamingo to the Wizard, from the White Pointer Shark to the Bower Bird, ten models of supervision are revealed.Ā Ā
Part horror and part comedy, this book opens the weeping wound of doctoral education, to salve and heal the consequences of problematic research cultures.
Trump Studies addresses this key question; probing the value of thinking, reading, writing and interpretation during times of economic, social and political uncertainty. With a compelling voice and academic rigour, the authors explore how and why xenophobia and sexism are the grammar of contemporary popular culture and politics.
The Brexit result and the Trump victory cannot be studied in a laboratory; the silent majority will not sit in a petri dish, waiting to be researched. The theories and methodologies developed into this book not only explain these two mega and meta events, they create space for ideas that challenge and dissent, and make the case for the role and value of universities in a time when evidence, expertise and facts often dissolve into opinion, emotion and fake news.
Donald Trump does not matter. Trump Studies does matter - and this is a siren call to all intellectuals to intervene and transform the currency of theory in empiricist times.
We live in panicked times, not careful times. While excessive food may be the basis of a moral panic about obesity, too much information is rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously, plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and information literacy, students and citizens wade through low quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable intellectual challenge, imagination and critique. Satisfied and compliant, they are not aware that other types of information are available. The task of Digital Dieting: From information obesity to intellectual fitness is to demonstrate the social, political and scholarly difficulties in managing large quantities of low quality information. Yet this is not a book that diagnoses crisis, excess and banality. Instead, the aim is to provide strategies to develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal.
This book presents two intertwined premises to consider.
(1) Decisions about teaching and learning have been automated, blocking reflection of what, how and why particular ideas are taught in particular ways. Therefore, it is necessary to bring the consciousness and consideration back to media and information selection.
(2) Fewer media create more meaning. One way to return the consciousness and reflection to education is to not only reduce the automation but question the assumption that more media, platforms, software, hardware and applications always improves teaching and learning. Re-empowering teachers and librarians in the construction of teaching, learning, media and assessment choices will stop software and hardware, managers and administrators ignoring the importance of information and media literacies.
From these maxims, the book offers two actions to commence a digital diet. Firstly, teachers, students and citizens must reduce the automated choices made within templates, applications and search engines. Simply because software or hardware is invented does not mean it must be used. Secondly, it is important to recognize that the internet has created resources beyond what any of us could have imagined in a local library, yet the provision of information and media literacy has not increased to a similar scale to manage this proliferation.
Digital Dieting: from information obesity to intellectual fitness provides active, conscious, careful and applicable strategies, options and opportunities to move students and citizens from searching to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.
_City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ has been edited by Professor Tara Brabazon and written by a team of experienced and innovative researchers with the aim of understanding cities as they are, rather than how they are marketed or branded. Certainly, all cities have much in common. Yet the differences are important, imaginative, marketed, promoted, mediated and transformed.
City imaging is a phrase that is increasingly used in public discourse, but it is rarely defined. It refers to how particular cities are branded and marketed. It is a theory of cities based on an assumption: representations can be transformed and sold, often for the purposes of tourism or attracting corporations and in-demand workers to one city over another. It is an imprecise science. Subjectivity, impressions, bias and prejudice floods the vista of the mind. Similarly, the visuality of a city often overwhelms the sounds, touch, taste and feel of urbanity. Different senses operate in some cities and not others. For Singapore, thick and humid air predominates. In Detroit, the greyness of industrialization ā from the historic motor plants or techno music ā saturates the visual palette.
The taste, smell, sounds and architectural iconography of a place align to construct an image of a city. The task for researchers and policy makers is to use or transform this image, to market the city as a tourist destination for music, sport, beaches or relaxation. Such a project is difficult. Words like regionality, deterritorialization, postindustrialization and decline confirm such a complexity. These words and phrases capture the panicked acceleration of contemporary life. Histories squeeze and loop. Geographies crack and morph. Yet after the war on terror, credit crunch and recession, it is necessary to quietly and patiently survey the wreckage of the 2000s.
Through fear, panic, ignorance, mobility and speed, cities matter. While the deterritorialization of the web enables the movement of money, music and ideas over national borders, cities remain important. _City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ explores the iconography of urbanity and what happens when branding is emphasized over living"
It is timely for such a monograph. In August 2001, Tara Brabazon, the editor of this book, published an academic article titled āHow imagined are virtual communities?ā The date is important. This was a key period of transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Cutting through these clichĆ©s, the article emerged just as the read-write web entered popular cultural currency. At that time, most consumers of websites were not producers. Most online activities were searching, reading and viewing, rather than commenting, writing and uploading. This article sketched provisional theoretical work on how Benedict Andersonās landmark monograph Imagined Communities could be translated into the burgeoning web environment. Anderson, in reviewing how formerly colonised people āinventedā nations to resist, reclaim and reinvigorate the languages, traditions and histories smashed by the colonisers, summoned the phrase Imagined Communities. He showed how arbitrary ā yet integral ā these imaginings became in creating and reinforcing moments and monuments of resistance and challenge.
Andersonās arguments about language, power and colonisation can be migrated to the next century. But caution is required. Since the editorās 2001 article, the web has matured. It is television with a cursor. It is a jukebox with a slot to swipe a credit card. It is a shop that delivers. It is a lover that texts commitment. But the web is also part of popular culture, weaving passion into interactivity. It has embedded into the life of millions and added further layers of exclusion and disconnection for the already disempowered. The exclusion of particular people becomes serious - more serious - when assumptions of connectivity and web literacy permeate governmental, commercial and educational institutions.
Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets enters the rapidly maturing social media environment and documents the quest ā if not the reality ā of community. It also notes that alongside every engaged, connected and supportive group are those who are excluded, marginalised, ridiculed or forgotten. The quest for authenticity for some layers injustice for others.
There is productive research to be completed in this moment of transformation. The writers in this collection probe the concept of community when it is imagined and imagining, disconnected from physical territory. Particularly, there is attention ā recognising the events in the Middle East in early 2011 ā on how social media creates political consciousness and how this consciousness manifests into social change both on and offline. The goal is not to segregate digital and analogue spaces and identities, but to look for productive, imaginative and creative relationships between these spheres.
The contributors enter digital microenvironments to explore the desires for connection and communication. They explore the quest for authenticity. Our task is to probe how technology redraws the boundaries between connection, consciousness and community. Put more clearly, and summoning one of the fathers of cultural studies, we test Raymond Williamsā maxim that, āthe process of communication is in fact the process of community.ā We do not assume that a community (inevitably) emerges from communication. We do not assume political change evolves from consciousness. Instead, the researchers in this collection open new spaces for thinking about language, identity and social connections.
A review of this book from Dancecult is available at: http://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/135/183
Actually, we live in an age of information obesity. Text messages. Tweets. Facebook updates. LinkedIn contacts. Emails. These digital interruptions are the punctuation of our analogue life. In such an environment, teaching and learning - curriculum and assessment - lurches from one āinnovationā to the next, often without reflection, consideration or respect for history, professionalism or educational outcomes.
My keynote address enters this supermarket of digital excess. We probe information obesity. But then, we enter a digital detox and conclude with digital dieting. The goal is to find the most potent and powerful assessment that develops learning, literacy and cultware, rather than frustration, interruption and software.
Five courses were completed: Managing as a Coach, Setting Expectations & Assessing Performance Issues, Coaching Practices, Coaching Conversations, Designing and Implementing Your Coaching Strategy.