Thursday 3rd December 2020, 10:30am-12:30pm

Online

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Please join us for our final C3P seminar for 2020 on Thursday 3rd December, 10:30AM-12:30PM. As usual, the seminar is designed to encourage C3P members to share materials around their current work so we can familiarise ourselves with each other’s research and facilitate discussion around the work. This seminar will contain discussion around works by Coralie Sanderson, Karen Cummings and Brian Yecies.

 

Coralie Sanderson

To the Ends of the Anxious Earth: Eco-Anxiety, Ecological Thought and the Fabulative Turn in Nordic Noir TV

Respondent: Senior Professor Sue Turnbull

This research project is situated at the intersection of media studies and environmental humanities. It explores the genre of television crime drama known as Nordic noir through eco-critical, philosophical and psychological lenses and asks why supernatural, gothic and folkloric themes and tropes have crept into the genre and why the resultant hybrid is being transnationally replicated. Importantly, the study asks why this fabulative turn is so popular at this time, and how as a cultural product, it might be reflecting contemporary concerns.

 

Dr Karen Cummings

Singing Hidden Histories 

View materials

Respondent: Elizabeth Drake

The Illawarra has had a long and fractious relationship with mining. It was the rich coal seams and the fertile farming soil that prompted European  theft of the lands of the Waddi Waddi people. Aboriginal trade routes were used to gain access to this rich landscape.

Many of these mines have been closed and there are remnants of the old old orchards in the Illawarra escarpment.  Mining, and coal mining in particular are now seen as major contributors to the Climate Emergency. In the period I will be focussing on (the Great Depression), mining communities were the focus of social and community life and were the drivers for insurgency against great economic and social injustice and a key part of the identity of the small mining communities in the Northern Illawarra. The Mining Union and the local community were key actors in protecting large squatting communities that dotted the escarpment. These squatters had been forced to move in order to apply for work at BHP. Most were unsuccessful and were moved on until they settled in the Northern Illawarra. 

My great uncle was one of them. The last remnants of these “squats” are adjacent to my home. They were formally given title to the land just twenty years ago. They have now  been sold on and developed. Gentrification has arrived and is gathering steam. I am a part of this.

The fields of psycho geography and of sound studies provide great material to begin thinking about unravelling the conflicted, trauma filled and contested landscapes and their memories and resonances. Will Self, Sioban Lyons, Maria Tumarkin and Andreas Huyson provide important insights into “traumascapes”, forgotten histories and the trivialisation of brutalisation. Multi million dollar mansions stand  where once stood depression humpies.  Before them over 5000 Indigenous people lived here for over 60,000 years. Nori Neumark , Susan Philippz, Konstantin Thomaidis and  Jonathon Sterne provide great frameworks for approaching using sound and voice to investigate, experience and unearth the resonance of the landscape that holds these histories and their scars.

I propose to research these contested memories of landscape, place and memory and develop a sound work using my voice and material recorded from the landscape, as well as songs and hymns of the mining communities to explore these hidden histories.  The place I intend to focus on has an old mine site and the remnants of squatter houses and is in front of the land I live on (where the pit ponies who worked the mines grazed.)

 

Associate Professor Brian Yecies

Webnovels and Innovation in the Digital Economy: What Can Australia Learn From Asia’s Creative Industries?

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Respondent: Dr Steinar Ellingsen

This speed-talk explores how a spectrum of mobile webnovels and their associated platforms and apps are transforming digital media ecosystems across Asia. It briefly addresses some of the technological convergence, as well as the content creators, global readers, and fan-translators in this emergent ecosystem, which is increasingly contributing to the multi-billion dollar creative industries. In so doing, I contemplate how this rapidly evolving domain of the digital economy can inform Australian content creators and enterprises seeking to capitalise on future opportunities in a COVID and post-COVID society.

 

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Coralie Sanderson is a PhD candidate at University of New England. Coralie’s research interest lies in the reflection of eco-anxiety in television crime drama, with a particular focus on its Scandinavian iterations. In 2019, she completed her Bachelor of Media and Communications (Hons 1) with her dissertation, titled Death by a Thousand Cuts: Climate Change, Solastalgia and Self-Harm in ‘Midnight Sun’. On graduation, she was awarded the University Medal. Her current research is focussed on eco-anxiety and ecological thought in Nordic Noir and how they might be influencing the creep of supernatural, gothic and folkloric themes and tropes into the genre.

 

Karen Cummings teaches singing to Music and Theatre students at UOW. She performs new works by a number of Australian composers and has just been awarded her PHD researching the impact of sound technology mediation on the transformation of the classical voice.

 

Brian Yecies is an Associate Professor in Communications and Media at the University of Wollongong. He researches on film, digital media, and the creative industries. He has authored over 80 publications in these areas, and he is a chief investigator on two Australian Research Council Discovery Projects: Digital China: From Cultural Presence to Innovative Nation (2017-2019), and Mobile Korean Webtoons: Creative Innovation in a New Digital Economy (2018-2020). He is the book author of Korea’s Occupied Cinemas, 1893-1948 (2011), The Changing Face of Korean Cinema, 1960-2015 (2016), and South Korea’s Webtooniverse and the Digital Comic Revolution (forthcoming) – co-authored with Aegyung Shim. Michael Keane, Brian Yecies and Terry Flew are the co-editors of Willing Collaborators: Foreign Partners in Chinese Media (2018).

 

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