In Defence of Dan Brown

Giving Sudanese-Australians a Voice in the Media

The Australian Human Rights Commission has highlighted the discrimination experienced by African-Australians in contemporary Australia - through media representations, and the adverse effects of such discrimination.

A critical challenge for any society is the search for social justice, a core dimension of which concerns the promotion of belonging, a sense of feeling a part of society.

An innovative research based journalism training initiative for Sudanese-Australians has been developed to seek to promote social inclusion and belonging through mobilising the communicative power of the media.

Copyright 2012 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Happiness and Other Bad Ideas

Over the past decade or so, there has been renewed interest in the question of happiness. Happiness studies, a multi-disciplinary field which combines insights from psychology, economics, politics and the natural sciences, has attempted to create a ‘science of happiness’. Although a relatively new field, happiness studies has attracted generous research funding. In the United States, for example, over the past decade, the US National Institute of Mental Health has handed out around $226 million in funding to researchers looking at happiness and other positive emotions. The reach and influence of happiness researchers is not confined to academic psychology. Employers are using the findings of research into happiness to manage staff and lift morale in the workplace. The findings of happiness research have, for example, begun to make inroads into debates about public policy. In the United Kingdom, for example, an advisor to the Blair Government argued that children should have lessons in happiness up to the age of 18 as a way to tackling increasing rates of depression. Geelong Grammar has already taken steps in this direction, employing the noted positive psychologist and author of Authentic Happiness Martin Seligman, for two terms. This paper asks why now? Why has happiness becomes a research concern? And, more importantly, has happiness studies delivered?

Copyright 2010 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Remembering Television: A Gap in the Records

National television archives routinely collect all manner of material about the medium, including information about producers, performers, writers as well as copies of the programs in which they were involved. In media studies terms, the industry and text side of the television equation is usually well attended to. Less well observed is how television was actually watched or what it meant to those who were doing the watching in specific geographical and cultural locations, then or now. Within the archives, the audience is rarely visible except as an anonymous ratings statistic. With this gap in the records in mind, it is salutory to note how often claims are made about the experience of television or the impact it has had on its viewers without anything but the slightest trace to work on. In this paper I will briefly identify those places in which the television audience has appeared including the random but revealing personal anecdote (Morris), as well as the occasional oral history (Barfield 2008), before reporting on the first stages of an ARC project entitled Australian television and Popular memory which promises to offer a new version of Australian television history.

Copyright 2010 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

In Defence of Dan Brown

Dan Brown's books mightn't be the best example of literature, but surely it has to have it's good points. Dr Chris Scanlon of La Trobe University's media department has some good things to say about it... or at least, the success it generates.

Copyright 2009 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.

Snuff Boxing: Revisiting the "Snuff" (1976) Coda

"Snuff" might not be the best‚ film produced in the Americas in the 1970s, but it may be the decade's most important worst‚ film. Rumoured to show the actual murder of a female crewmember in its final moments, its notoriety consolidated the urban legend of snuff film. The snuff film legacy has manifested across a broad range of media, from fictional snuff narratives like "Vacancy" (Nimród Antal, 2007) and "8mm" (Joel Schumacher, 1999), to fuelling rumours about the appearance of real‚ snuff footage online and distributed through mobile phones. The snuff film enigma was so intoxicatingly extra diegetic that it transcended the nuts-and-bolts details of the film itself, the shocking impact of those final five minutes appearing to render close analysis unnecessary. "Snuff", like snuff, was predicated upon a hyperactive theatricality of ambiguity, rumour and moral panic. This paper will reconsider the notorious "Snuff" coda, exploring alternate readings of this coda aside from the heated debates that marked the anti-pornography discourse that surrounded its original release.

Alexandra Nicholas is a Ph.D. candidate currently writing her thesis on microhistory and paracinematic horror in the Cinema Studies program. In 2007, she completed her MA thesis on rape-revenge film (for which she was awarded an university merit citation), and in 2006, she won an ARC Cultural Network Award for her work on Australian horror cinema. She publishes regularly in Metro magazine, and in 2009 has refereed journal articles appearing in Limina, Philament, Cinephile (the film journal of the University of British Columbia) and a book chapter on Ozploitation appearing in the collection, Trash Cinema.

Copyright 2009 La Trobe University, all rights reserved. Contact for permissions.