Debbie Rodan

Discourses of democracy in the aftermath of 9/11 and other events: protectivism versus humanitarianism

In responding to the events of 11 September 2001—the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington—George W. Bush announced to the world that democracy itself was under attack, and that such an attack1 represented a threat to democracy. Such an interpretation of these events, along with portraying Western democracy as a victim in need of protection and as ‘good’—and establishing thereby the moral high ground—also represented one of the main discourses in which the Tampa refugees were discussed in Australia, and has continued to be a prominent discourse in public discussion within Australia about the War on Terror, the Bali Bombings and both refugees and detention centres. Drawing on a detailed analysis of letters to the editor published in The Australian in the aftermath of 9/11, this paper seeks to show not only that discussion of the events of 2001 and 2002 has tended to coalesce around two apparently irreconcilable discourses—that of the aforementioned desire to protect democracy or ‘our way of life’ versus that expressive of a kind of ‘globalized humanitarianism’—but that these discourses are indeed not so much irreconcilable but share a common ground along with common stakes and ends.

Discursive Australia: Refugees, Australianness, and the Australian public sphere

The discussion within Australia of events of the last five years, such as 9/11, the Bali Bombing, the Tampa and the Children Overboard affair, the Cronulla Riots, as well as the numbers of refugees approaching Australian shores, has typically fallen into a binarized form with public discourses coalescing around calls for either ‘protectivism’ or ‘humanitarianism’ (Mummery & Rodan, 2003). This discursive framework has in turn instantiated an ongoing debate concerning the issue of what it means to be Australian, and who is or should be included or excluded from this national identity, questions which have been particularly contentious in recent years. This project, however, aims to unpack and analyse just one manifestation of this debate, that carried out in letters to the editor published between 22 January and 28 February 2002 in both The Australian (Australia’s national daily broadsheet) and The West Australian (Western Australia’s daily broadsheet). The period chosen for this analysis is important for several reasons. First, given that it encompasses the Woomera Detention

Mediation for affect: Coming to care about factory-farmed animals

In this article, we examine the digitalised emotional campaigning of one of Australia’s peak animal welfare body, Animals Australia, focusing on their most effective digital strategies associated with their campaigns against factory farming. Our broader interest lies with sounding out the affective affordances of the technologies informing such activist work; technologies of affect in a very significant sense. This discussion comprises three parts. First, we unpack the context for the problematic faced by animal and environmental activisms: neoliberalism, showing how neoliberal assumptions constrain such activisms to emotional appeals and denounce them for such strategising. Second, we sound out some of the affordances of digital media technologies for affectively oriented activisms; and finally, we delve into some of Animals Australia’s digital campaigning with regard to issues of factory farming in order to show the efficacy of such affectively oriented mediated strategising for the forming of new relations with factory farm.

Large, sleek, slim, stylish flat screens: Privatized space and the televisual experience

This paper is an analysis of recent print media/magazine advertisements featuring home theatre systems and Plasma as well as LCD televisions in Australia. In their promotion of large new flat television screens, the paper reveals how advertisers highlight the social atomization of space by creating private, isolated cinematic spaces where television viewing is privatized. As a consequence, broadcasting as a collective shared experience is diminished. The focus on the isolated viewer who can personalize and atomize his or her viewing experience privileges a form of privatization (Williams, 1974, 26–27) that stresses the “self-sufficient” home, enabled through a kind of technological mobility. My main argument is that the advertisements signify a privatized individual viewer. Rarely do they suggest that television watching is also a social and collective experience.

Everyday Transformations—the Twenty-First Century Quotidian

New technologies, increasing work pressures, changing gender roles and family structures, concerns about security, increasing flows of refugees and asylum seekers, environmental risks, the escalating speed and complexity of social transactions— everyday life is today a terrain of rapid and unsettling change. Yet it retains associations also with pattern, order, routine—the familiarity of a favourite soap opera or talk show, the ordinary pleasures and irritations of shopping, cooking, negotiating traffic, managing domestic life. How should cultural studies address questions of everyday life in the twenty-first century? The field can claim a rich tradition of work in the area, from ethnographies of street subcultures and shopping centres to writing on television and popular magazines. But everyday life has been transformed in significant ways since the time of many of the founding contributions. What remains relevant today in the study of everyday life? To what extent do we need new concepts and categories? Transformations have also occurred in cultural studies’ motivations for engaging with everyday life. The everyday is a major point of intersection for many of its intellectual tributaries, including British cultural studies, feminism, semiotics, surrealism, situationism , psychoanalysis and ethnomethodology. Yet the context for each of these has been affected by shifts in the location of cultural studies, by the nature and priorities of higher education, by the increasing market orientation of mainstream institutions and by conservative attempts to lay claim to the ‘ordinary’ and ‘mainstream’. What do we seek now in engaging with the everyday? What understanding of this engagement is most appropriate for the times? The special issue papers collected in this issue of Continuum, ‘Everyday Transformations— the Twenty-First Century Quotidian’, proceed from the annual conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia held in Perth, Western

The prospect of the internet democracy

Our experience has proved to us that a single copy, or a few, deposited in MS in the public offices cannot be relied on for any great length of time. The ravages of fire and of ferocious enemies have had but too much part in producing the very loss we now deplore. How many of the precious works of antiquity were lost while they existed only in manuscript? Has there ever been one lost since the art of printing has rendered it practicable to multiply and disperse copies? This leads us then to the only means of preserving those remains of our laws now under consideration, that is, a multiplication of printed copies (cited in Eisenstein 1979, 115–16).