Michael Bourk

Representing Islam and Muslims in New Zealand Newspapers

This study uses quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse how New Zealand mainstream newspapers represent Islamic identity and Muslim communities. Events reported between October 2005 and September 2006 by three broadsheet metropolitan dailies are analysed to identify prominent news themes and how Muslims are socially constructed. In particular, four events occurring across the period are analysed with a view to comparing the texts with other studies that argue Muslims are constructed in Orientalist terms as dangerous others. The Bali bomb incident, London bomb scare at Heathrow Airport, Middle East conflict, and Iranian Nuclear issue represent prominent news stories that allow the identification of stereotypes and negative depictions, which reinforce Orientalism. The findings suggest a disparity in some newspapers in the sample between hard news and editorials. Although hard news appears to reinforce Orientalist representation of Muslims, the editorials adopt a more liberal pluralist construction of Islamic identity and issues.

'A Makara-like wave came crashing': Sri Lankan narratives of the boxing day tsunami

The Boxing Day tsunami in 2004 brought widespread loss of life and destruction to most of the coastal communities of Sri Lanka. Communities attempting to make sense of the natural disaster and subsequent destruction struggle to describe such unusual and cataclysmic events, which can transform benign physical local environments into disaster zones. Natural disasters force people to rethink the relationship between culture and nature, often using the bricolage of available signs and concepts. This case study uses data from Sri Lankan English-language newspapers, in-depth interviews and a focus group to identify prominent themes in the recollections of the tsunami and its aftermath. Four themes are drawn primarily from oral narratives of a small coastal community near Galle in the south: monster and monsterisation of victims; metaphysical reciprocity; reconsideration of mythical events; and unique corporeality. Arguably, these themes resonate to varying degrees with descriptive and explanatory force to facilitate psychological recovery for those affected. The findings suggest that communities affected by natural disasters make sense of traumatic events through descriptions and narratives that give symbolic and/or ideological agency to events in an effort to rationalise them and restore order to peoples lives and place in the universe.

Iconizing “Muslim Terrorism” in a British Newspaper and Public Perception

Abstract By examining a news story and reader responses published in the Daily Mail Online (DMO), our study discursively argues that this daily newspaper promotes an Orientalist perception of Islam and Muslims. The religion and its adherents are both framed and perceived as a threat to British society and its “Western values”, thus reinforcing Islamophobia within society. This study also argues that the DMO espouses the perceived Orientalist threat posed by Islam through juxtaposition, exaggeration and manipulation of facts, through lexical choices and visual images that eventually establishes the perception of a cultural clash. In addition, by examining the readers’ responses toward the news story, this study demonstrates that the vast majority of respondents perceive Islam and Muslims as a threat to “the West”. Their comments, as triggered by the text, also contribute to the discourse of Islamophobia and the perceived Orientalist view of an Islamic threat.

What Global Perspective Does Our University Foster in Our Students

We used a modified circuit of culture enquiry to explore processes of production, representation and consumption of global perspective at our university, in the context of fostering this perspective as a graduate attribute. We identified four frame packages by which this perspective is understood and communicated. Global perspective is framed within our institution simultaneously as essentially cooperative and as competitive. We express concern about how such complexity is fostered in our students. We ask our colleagues and university teachers internationally to critically reflect upon the diversity of global perspectives extant within higher education and potentially to clarify their intentions as university teachers.

Book Review: Media Mergers and the Defence of PluralismHultenO., TjernstromS. and MeleskoS. (eds), Media Mergers and the Defence of Pluralism, Nordicom, Goteborg, 2010, ISBN 9 7891 8652 3077, 214 pp., €25.00.

This book examines a broad spectrum of queer films and other visual media created in response to the AIDS epidemic. Hallas puts the reader in touch with an archive of rarely seen material that speaks to popular media constructions of the epidemic and male homosexuality, encompassing film, television, installation art and opera. The works Hallas has selected ‘explicitly structure themselves as mediated acts of bearing witness’ (p. 9), drawing attention to the performative nature of conventional documentary and other media techniques such as the ‘talking head’. Negotiating the likelihood of an audience interpreting queer AIDS testimony as ‘confessing’ to the supposed pathology of homosexuality, these works endeavour to counter popular representations of the male, homosexual, seropositive body as stigmatised, isolated and marginal. The book also provides historical and artistic context for most of the films analysed, delving into their production and reception in order to better explicate their role as works of AIDS activism and ‘historicise’ the experience of AIDS. Hallas’s work is compelling and engaging, achieving a balance between necessarily detailed descriptions of rare works and insightful analysis of the techniques employed. The work also smoothly incorporates a range of theoretical perspectives, without jargon. The strategy of drawing on other theories of marginalisation and exclusion, such as feminism and Marxism, in addition to queer theories provides a richer framework. Hallas references a range of literature at pertinent points in the study, although I would have preferred to see a more comprehensive engagement with the literature on AIDS discourses up front, which would provide a clearer framework for what the activist filmmakers were working against. As a whole, the work reads well, with its ideas flowing in a natural and logical way. However, a clearer sense of structure and a more methodical approach to situating the works within production and reception contexts would aid in historicising the experiences represented. The first chapter in particular is quite decontextualised, and would benefit from the kind of context afforded to later chapters. Another minor addition that would have aided the ‘nonlinear’ reader and helped to unify the book would have been the inclusion of more explicit links between chapters, particularly to films and ideas previously discussed or mentioned. Reframing Bodies is an important and accessible work on queer visual art, AIDS activism and postmodern self-reflexivity, employing uncluttered prose to articulate complex questions of representation, testimony, homosexuality and AIDS. — Deb Waterhouse-Watson, English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Framing Australian Telecommunication Policy: A Case Study of the 1996 'Review of Standard Telephone Service'

This article discusses the influence of sociolinguistic structures such as metaphors and narratives as organising cognitive frames on telecommunication policy, its representation in the media and other public documents. In particular, it identifies the tension between competing narratives of national development and competition in the public debates and official records of the 1996 Review of Standard Telephone Service. The article argues that metaphors and narratives perform similar but distinctive persuasive and formative functions that extend beyond mere description. Collectively, they influence not only what we think of telecommunication technology and associated policy but how we imagine alternative policy scenarios and future technological innovation.