Anne Surma

The mutable identities of women in public relations

The notion that contemporary society as a knowledge economy is undergoing profound transformation has implications for the occupation of public relations, as well as the professional and personal identities of public relations practitioners. With the increasing erosion of once clear demarcations between people, time, space and communication technologies, public relations practitioners experience increasing tensions in their encounters between self and other, private and public, economic and cultural factors. We are interested in how women in public relations undertake identity work as a way of responding to these pressures, notably at the point where their home and work lives intersect. In interviews and focus groups conducted in Perth, Western Australia, women of different ages and career backgrounds related their experiences of juggling multiple roles including worker, mother, partner, friend, parent or grandparent. The findings reveal a set of complex identity constructions that indicate that some women are successful in separating professional and personal identities, while others are unable to resist work as an all-encompassing activity and as the marker of a meaningful identity. To develop as a public relations practitioner involves not only the social expectations of what it means to be a professional coupled with an individual’s presentation of themselves in public relations. It also involves a changeable relationship that expands over the whole life situation, including career trajectories and family life stages. A recognition of this set of circumstances prompts further research questions in relation to public relations and its specific influence on gendered, identity and relationship practices, and has significant implications for the profession more broadly.

Challenging Unreliable Narrators: Writing and Public Relations

In this chapter I focus on public relations (print or online) texts, which an organisation or corporation circulates specifically to articulate directly or indirectly its understandings of its social responsibilities, and I discuss the ways in which its writing of narratives is used as a specific rhetorical device to define itself to its stakeholders as a socially responsible moral agent. I argue for public relations writing as a potentially valuable social activity involving the construction, circulation, contestation and development of narratives. Such narrative texts specifically include social responsibility reports, documents that are becoming increasingly significant in a corporation’s demonstration of its understanding and implementation of ethical, business-related practices. Many other public relations texts, such as employee newsletters, community relations brochures, client magazines, sections of annual reports, Internet sites and so on, which devote space to describing issues related to social responsibility, are also implicated in this chapter’s discussion.1

Imagining the cosmopolitan in public and professional writing

List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: A Cosmopolitan Orientation Conceptualising the Cosmopolitan Approach to Writing Writing in the network Sentencing: Reflecting on Words and Worlds Rewriting Organisational Change The Multinational Corporation - Writing Cosmopolitan Responsibility? Conclusion: Reimagining the Cosmopolitan Appendix Endnotes Bibliography

In a different voice: ‘a letter from Manus Island’ as poetic manifesto

Abstract On 9 December 2017, The Saturday Paper published ‘A Letter from Manus Island’, an essay and manifesto written by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist and refugee being held on Manus Island with hundreds of other men. Boochani writes in a radical, ‘poetic’ voice that makes the ordinary strange again, as he talks of love, the interdependence of human beings, and the strength to be derived from acts of solidarity. He challenges not only the prevailing vituperative tenor of contemporary public rhetoric, but also the dehumanising discourses within which humanitarian practices in Australia, and in the west more broadly, operate. This paper is written as a letter, in direct reply to Boochani’s own. It is inspired by Lilie Chouliaraki’s critique of contemporary practices of humanitarianism and the ways in which politics, the market and technology have transformed ‘the moral dispositions of our public life’. It explores the unsettling effects and provocative insights presented by Boochani’s poetic voice – the refugee as human subject and agent rather than victim or object of pity (or hate). The paper thus reflects on our conventional responses to the ethical call to solidarity from vulnerable subjects and imagines how we might respond otherwise.