[This is an edited version of the workshop outline document you can find on the FHAANZ page here]
FHAANZ/SSAAANZ Postgraduate Workshop:
2–6 pm on Tuesday, June 30 Venue: Michie Building (Building 9) at The University of Queensland, St Lucia, Brisbane
Sponsored by the School of Communication and Arts
UQ Convenor: Associate Professor Jane Stadler
RSVP: rhdcommarts@uq.edu.au by 5pm June 1
This afternoon schedule of research workshops provides postgraduate conference participants with the chance to meet senior people in the field and to have the opportunity to engage in a meaningful discussion of research. Parallel sessions will be led by the conference’s keynote speakers and visiting scholars and will include methodologies workshops and interactive seminars on topics related to the keynote papers the research interests of these senior scholars. Participants will select one session from 2.00–3.30 and one from 3.30–5.00 pm. The day will conclude with a catered social event from 5–6 pm so that the postgraduate research students, senior scholars and keynote speakers can continue discussions informally.
2.00–3.30 pm in room 801 on level 8 in the Michie Building Professor Tom O’Regan: Intermediality and the Contemporary Screenscape
Beginning with a short research presentation by Professor O’Regan, this seminar will open out into an interactive discussion in which postgraduate participants will be invited to share their research and seek advice about strategic approaches to research and publication.
2.00–3.30 pm in room 803 Michie Associate Professor Jane Mills: The Spatial Turn
This workshop will explore how critical thinking relating to the historicisation of place and the spatialisation of history might be relevant to your research. It will spring from a discussion relating to how the “spatial turn” related to A/Professor Mills’s research on ‘sojourner cinema’, that is, films made by directors who visit a foreign country as a guest to make a film in and about their host nation. This filmic category interrogates the spatial and historical relationship between national and world cinemas. Participants will then be invited to consider how the space-time relationship does or could inform their own research projects.
To enable a highly interactive discussion, please send A/Professor Mills a short outline of your current work and briefly outline a research problem or question that has arisen in your research project/s at jane.mills@unsw.edu.au with “FHAANZ Research Workshop” as the subject.
In preparation for this workshop, please read A/Professor Mills’s article:
• Mills, Jane. “Sojourner Cinema: Seeking and Researching a New Cinematic Category.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 55.1 (2014): Article 9. Available at: http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/framework/vol55/iss1/9.
Other texts that would prove valuable to read in advance are:
• Tsatsou, Panayiota. “Reconceptualising ‘Time’ and ‘Space’ in the Era of Electronic Media and Communications.” PLATFORM: Journal of Media and Communication 1 (2009): 11-32. Available at: http://journals.culturecommunication.unimelb.edu.au/platform/resources/includes/vol1/Platfo rmVol1_Tsatsou.pdf
• Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Time and Place.” Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977.
3.30–5.00 pm in room 801 on level 8 in the Michie Building Professor Geoff Lealand: “Stalking Shirley Temple: Doing Historical Research”
This interactive workshop investigates Shirley Temple competitions using a methodology Richard Maltby and colleagues refer to as ‘new cinema history.’ When Maltby asks “How can Cinema History Matter More?” in his article about the “issues involved in writing historical studies of cinema that are not centrally about films,” his interest is in studying the history of film reception and bringing it into dialogue with other disciplines. In this workshop, Professor Lealand follows Maltby’s lead in advocating an historical study that is grounded in film culture and cinematic texts without being centred on the analysis of films themselves. This draws on the work he has been doing interviewing four elderly women in Christchurch and Auckland, who were contestants (and winners) in Shirley Temple ‘double’ competitions in 1935. The research method also involves using ephemeral historical sources such as hand-made scrapbooks from the 1930s to investigate cultural memory, fandom, conceptions of stardom and celebrity, and changing notions of the child star.
3.30–5.00 pm in room 803 on level 8 in the Michie Building Professor Stuart Cunningham: “Plus ca change…Historical parallels and/of the digital convulsion”
Studying contemporary change in screen industries often attracts criticism from those who would suggest that a focus on the ‘always now’ creates historical amnesia. But change is continuous; the analytical question addresses the rate and significance of change. For this, not just inert but strategic historical knowledge is called for – knowledge of key moments, forks in the road, decisions taken and not taken, and an awareness of the importance, and the limitations, of historical parallelism. This session works with Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World (Cunningham & Silver 2013), the first monograph to attempt an overview of the rate and significance of change engendered by the new digital platforms on the screen industries, inviting engagement with and critique of its analytical method. Professor Cunningham will run a highly interactive session.
Participants needing to have read beforehand Screen Distribution and the New King Kongs of the Online World (Cunningham & Silver 2013), which is a short text available as an ebook from Amazon, hardback from Palgrave, or in university libraries:
http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=666184 http://www.amazon.com/Screen-Distribution-Kongs-Online-World/dp/1137326441
5.00–6.00 pm: Drinks and Canapés at Darwin’s (Biological Sciences Library, Building 94)
The day will conclude with a social event held at an adjacent venue on campus, Darwin’s café and bar, where postgraduate researchers and senior academics can continue research conversations informally.
Sydney Screen Studies Network 