Liam Grealy

Negotiating cultural authenticity in hip-hop: Mimicry, whiteness and Eminem

Whether it is condemned for its racial and gender representations or lauded as the voice of a generation, hip-hop has brought black youth culture to the forefront of popular culture. In this paper ...

Menacing Dennis: Representing ‘Australia’s most hated man’ and popular protests for policy change

From 2003 until 2012 the Australian media closely followed child sex offender Dennis Ferguson as he appeared in and was expelled from numerous local communities. Unattractive, alone, and obstinately unwilling to acknowledge his crimes, Ferguson conformed to dominant representations elsewhere of the stranger paedophile that demands ongoing governmental intervention. This article closely examines media and political discourses in which Ferguson has operated as a metonymic focal point for public considerations of child sex offending in Australia across the last decade, defined in relation to various conceptions of safe, responsible community. It considers public debates about how best to respond to the release of such offenders and the significance of Ferguson to the development of new Australian law and policy applying to sex offenders as an exceptional population, including extended supervision and continuing detention orders, and post-release institutions. As such, the article argues for close attention paid to the figures which garner media and political attention and around whom new policy approaches are developed, including their limiting effects for addressing problems such as child sexual abuse.

Higher degree research by numbers: beyond the critiques of neo-liberalism

ABSTRACT This article argues that strong theories of neo-liberalism do not provide an adequate frame for understanding the ways that measurement practices come to be embedded in the life-worlds of those working in higher education. We argue that neo-liberal metrics need to be understood from the viewpoint of their social usage, alongside other practices of qualification and quantification. In particular, this article maps the specific variables attending measurement in higher degree research programmes, as the key sites that familiarize students with measurement practices around research and teaching. With regard to the incremental reframing of doctoral study as a utilitarian pursuit, we suggest a need to better identify the singular and immeasurable features of long-term research projects, and argue for a revitalized notion of failure. In this context, this article suggests that many critiques of neo-liberalism do not sufficiently advance alternative ways to think about the purposes and limitations of higher education.

Cliché, Gossip, and Anecdote as Supervision Training.

As a PhD candidate some years ago I attended a seminar on career planning at a cultural studies conference. The speakers canvassed topics relevant to PhDs and early career researchers (ECRs) considering pathways into academic employment. During the discussion, the audience became noticeably deflated when one senior scholar noted that, “There are no academic jobs anymore, or at least not enough.” Afterwards, over a bitter conference coffee, conversation amongst PhD candidates turned to plans for post-thesis life, including strategies for academic employment. One student told an envious anecdote of someone they knew who had “walked into” a full-time academic position following their PhD. Another shared their intention to apply for a position their supervisor had advised them about, yet to be advertised. This article expands on a co-authored project with Timothy Laurie on the practices and ethics of higher degree research (HDR) supervision (or advising): “What does good HDR supervision look like?” in contemporary universities. It connects that project with scholarship on the relevance of “common sense” to questions of knowledge, value, action, and critique. This work is drawn together here in relation to supervision training: “How do we learn to supervise?” and “How are we inculcated into common sense about supervision practices?” Although the co-authored supervision project aims to contribute to discussions about what might constitute good training for HDR supervision, this article is primarily interested in the how questions: How do we learn about good and bad, or effective and ineffective, supervision practices, including their diversity, and about the institutional and disciplinary expectations that define them as such? These questions are pursued below in relation to a number of discursive means that are central to how we learn to supervise: cliché, gossip, and anecdote. These are forms of speech through which knowledge about supervision practices circulates in academic contexts. In addition to this, participating in such speech genres—coming to understand their conventions, assumed logics, and appropriate contexts of enunciation—constitutes supervision training in important ways. That is, in different ways, cliché, gossip, and anecdote both teach us about supervision and form social relations and approaches to knowledge integral to effective supervision. This acknowledgment is

Reorienting the Henson debate: child pornography, consent and the masturbating adolescent

The saga surrounding Bill Hensons production and dissemination of an image of a naked 12-year-old girl, ‘N.’, has been well documented. It was a public debate narrowly staged between child protection and artistic freedom. The question of consent relates to each of these foci. In this paper, I explore consent and the age of consent in relation to the Henson saga, identifying two crises of consent regarding adolescence and child pornography law in New South Wales (NSW). In addition, I reorient the analysis of consent to the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, considering how this concept is imbricated with citizenship-oriented sexual pedagogies that are differentially organized according to gender. The inheritances of these pedagogies have underpinned our reactions to the Henson saga.

In the name of the nation: Media classification, globalisation, and exceptionalism:

This article examines the relationship between exceptionalism and nationhood in media classification. The history of age-ratings is an international one, and the present challenges associated with digital media circulation are similarly international. We argue that the nation nevertheless provides an appropriate frame for understanding age-rating by attending to the ways national agencies have struggled to articulate the specificity of their work based on the specificity of domestic constituencies. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, our central examples include the resistance of the Motion Picture Association of America to age-based film classification, the British Board of Film Classification’s examination of American films in the 1980s, contemporary Japanese videogame regulation, and the emergence of the International Age Rating Coalition. We argue that national exceptionalism is itself generalised and that media content regulation is less about producing national culture than about laying claim to a nation by differentiation.