Cultural Studies

Biography, Cultural Studies, Life Writing
Border Crossings: Essays in Identity and Belonging
09.06.19 | Permalink | Comments Off on Border Crossings: Essays in Identity and Belonging

The border between intimate memory and historical revelation is explored in this wide-ranging collection, which features original contributions from leading figures in the life-writing field from Australia, Canada, Europe, the UK, and the USA.

https://www.routledge.com/Border-Crossings-Essays-in-Identity-and-Belonging-1st-Edition/Arthur-Kurvet-Kaosaar/p/book/9781138671096
Communication and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies, Humanities, Life Writing
Migration Experiences: Acknowledging the Past, and Sustaining the Present and Future
05.12.18 | Permalink | Comments Off on Migration Experiences: Acknowledging the Past, and Sustaining the Present and Future

Australia is recognised as one of the world’s most culturally and ethnically diverse nations. Immigration has historically played an important role in the nation’s economic, social and cultural development. There is a pressing need to find innovative technological and archival approaches to deal with the challenge to digitally preserve Australia’s migrant heritage, especially given the ageing of the European communities that were the first to come under the postwar mass migration scheme. This paper reports on plans for a national collaborative project to develop the foundational infrastructure for a dynamic, interoperable, migrant data resource for research and education.

The Migration Experiences platform will connect and consolidate heterogeneous collections and resources and will provide an international exemplar underscoring the importance of digital preservation of cultural heritage and highlighting the opportunities new technologies can offer.
Biography, Cultural Studies, Historical Studies, Humanities, Life Writing
Migrating People, Migrating Data: Digital Approaches to Migrant Heritage
09.11.18 | Permalink | Comments Off on Migrating People, Migrating Data: Digital Approaches to Migrant Heritage

Global migration is one of the defining characteristics of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Migrants all over the world have left multiple traces in different countries, and this cultural heritage is of growing interest to researchers and to the migrant communities themselves. Cultural heritage institutions, however, have dwindling funds and resources to meet the demand for the heritage of immigrant communities to be protected.

In this article we propose that the key to bridging this gap is to be found in new possibilities that are opened up if resources are linked to enable digital exploration of archival records and collections. In particular, we focus on the value of building a composite and distributed resource around migrants’ life courses. If this approach is used and dispersed collections held by heritage institutions can be linked, migrant communities can have access to detailed information about their families and researchers to a wealth of data—serial and qualitative—for sophisticated and innovative research. Not only does the scattered data become more usable and manageable, it becomes more visible and coherent; patterns can be discovered that were not apparent before. We use the Dutch-Australian collaborative project “Migrant: Mobilities and Connection” as an example and case study of this life course–centered methodology and propose that this may develop into a migration heritage template for migrants worldwide.
Biography, Cultural Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing
Migrant Nation
05.04.18 | Permalink | Comments Off on Migrant Nation

‘Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity’ provides a rich understanding of the complexity of contemporary Australian society – its politics, culture and identity.

The essays in ‘Migrant Nation’ explore the gap between Australian image and experience, telling stories of individuals and groups that offer fresh insights into identity construction. In this way this collection casts light onto the hidden face Australian identity and pays respect to the experiences of a wide variety of people who have generally been excluded, neglected or simply forgotten in the long-running quest to tell a unified story of Australian culture and identity, a story that is rapidly unravelling.

Whether in terms of language, history, culture or personal circumstances, many of the subjects of these essays were foreign to the settler dream. The stories reveal their efforts to establish a sense of legitimacy and belonging outside of the dominant Australian story. Drawing upon memories, letters, interviews, documentary fragments and archives, the authors have in common a commitment to give life to neglected histories and thus to include, in an expanding and open-ended national narrative, people who were cast as strangers in the place that was their home.

Published January 2018: http://www.anthempress.com/migrant-nation
Biography, Communication and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Life Writing
Coda: Data Generation
20.09.15 | Permalink | Comments Off on Coda: Data Generation

Auto/biography is just one of many disciplines that have been deeply influenced by advances in digital media and computing, and that have required new theoretical approaches to help understand the changes. As I have argued elsewhere, however, it may be that the digital revolution has had a more profound effect on biography and life writing than on any other branch of literature, perhaps any branch of the arts. In the 1990s, personal web pages and chatrooms offered new modalities for public and private expression that greatly facilitated life writing; this was a transformational period, opening up possibilities that have been multiplying ever since. In today’s era of ubiquitous computing and an increasingly data-driven global society, the Web has evolved to be an interface to a deeper layer of stores and flows of data that can be made manifest in many ways, in different views, and on any number of devices.
Cultural Studies, History, Life Writing
Material Memory and the Digital
19.05.15 | Permalink | Comments Off on Material Memory and the Digital

Over the past two decades, memory, understood as both the act of remembering and a means of storing memories, has been relocating itself. In its daily usage it has been moving from the mind to the computer—from neurological systems to digital technologies—as people increasingly outsource memory to digital devices. In this essay I focus on the changing nature of remembering—and forgetting—in the digital era. With an emphasis on personal stories I ask: How is intergenerational memory transfer changing as a result of digital media technologies? Specifically, what are the implications of the shift to digital storage and communication processes for the way we retain, pass on, or receive private and intimate material? How has this changed the way we see ourselves and view our lives, and allow others to see ourselves and our lives?
Biography, Cultural Studies, Life Writing, Literary Studies
Private Lives, Intimate Readings
08.05.15 | Permalink | Comments Off on Private Lives, Intimate Readings

In any attempt to report on the life of another, or even one’s own life, an inescapable ethical dilemma arises that relates to entering intensely private areas of experience and presenting intimate subject matter for the world to see. How much intimate material should be revealed? For what purpose? To whose benefit? At what risk? How?

In an era when millions of people are willing to share the minutiae of their individual daily lives via social media and the private lives of the famous are exposed routinely to mass audiences, such questions loom larger than ever. With easier access to private information—by governments, hackers, marketers, and private citizens—this area has become one of global concern in the context of the fundamental human right to privacy. Critical engagement with the private and the intimate has always been a key characteristic of life-writing studies, and this field has made a noteworthy contribution to contemporary reconceptualisations of the private and the public spheres and the intricate interconnections between them.
Cultural Studies, Digital Scholarship, e-Research, Humanities
Launch of HuNI Virtual Laboratory for Australian Cultural Data
01.11.14 | Permalink | Comments Off on Launch of HuNI Virtual Laboratory for Australian Cultural Data

The Humanities Networked Infrastructure (HuNI) is a national Virtual Laboratory project developed as part of the Australian government’s NeCTAR (National e-Research Collaboration Tools and Resources) program. HuNI combines information from 30 of Australia’s most significant cultural datasets. These datasets comprise more than 2 million authoritative records relating to the people, organisations, objects and events that make up Australia’s rich cultural heritage. HuNI also enables researchers to work with and share this large-scale aggregation of cultural information. HuNI has been developed as a partnership between 13 public institutions, led by Deakin University. By providing researchers worldwide with access to the combined resources of Australia’s most important cultural datasets and information assets, HuNI is recognised as the first national, cross-disciplinary virtual laboratory of its kind to be established anywhere in the world.
Biography, Cultural Studies, Life Writing, Literary Studies
Memory and Commemoration in the Digital Present
30.10.14 | Permalink | Comments Off on Memory and Commemoration in the Digital Present

The first ‘Digital Death Day,’ held on 20 May 2010, brought together world experts in the fields of death studies, social networking and data management. Promoting the event, coordinator Jennifer Holmes commented, “The online memorial has already become the new grave” (Andrews 2010). How seriously should we take such a statement? Was this turn of phrase simply intended to indicate the increasing dependence on digital media for performing social rituals? Or has online memorialisation in fact created a new kind of ‘resting place’ for the deceased and if so what is the nature of that place and how do the living relate to it? Whether through intentional online memorialisation or through the unplanned bestowing of an afterlife on anyone who has had an active online presence in life, it is now indisputable that the digital world is being populated, at an exponentially growing rate, by the stories, images, traces and voices of the dead – so much so that this digital afterlife can be seen as a new kind of immortality.
Biography, Cultural Studies, Life Writing
Framing Lives
05.10.14 | Permalink | Comments Off on Framing Lives

Never before in the history of representation have there been so many available ways for art to represent and to “frame” lives. At the same time, the explosion of biographical information that social media have enabled has demonstrated dramatically the illusionist basis of the enterprise of biographical containment. The very idea of “auto/biography” has in recent years broken out of its own conventional frames to enlist genres and modes of representation that have more commonly operated in other arenas or have played supporting roles, rather than taking center stage themselves, as they do in many of the biographical works considered in this collection of essays. Whether their focus is on cartoons, photographs, installations, graphic memoirs, films, games, or narrative texts, these essays rigorously explore and unravel the notion of “framing” as it applies to presenting and displaying lives.

about

Paul Arthur is Vice-Chancellor’s Professorial Research Fellow and Chair in Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. He speaks and publishes widely on major challenges and changes facing 21st-century society, from the global impacts of technology on communication, culture and identity to migration and human rights. Paul Arthur has been director of the Edith Cowan Centre for Global Issues from 2016–2021 and leader of ECU’s university-wide Society and Culture research theme in 2021–2022. He was Australia’s first Professor in Digital Humanities (Western Sydney University, 2013–2016). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has held visiting positions in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America, and given keynote and plenary talks in twenty countries. His forthcoming book is Open Scholarship in the Humanities (with Lydia Hearn, Bloomsbury 2023). Click here for full Profile

search

recent

inside

feeds

Follow Paul

Email

pwlarthur [at]
gmail [dot] com

Category

Cultural Studies

Biography, Cultural Studies, Life Writing

Border Crossings: Essays in Identity and Belonging

Communication and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Digital Scholarship, Historical Studies, Humanities, Life Writing

Migration Experiences: Acknowledging the Past, and Sustaining the Present and Future

Biography, Cultural Studies, Historical Studies, Humanities, Life Writing

Migrating People, Migrating Data: Digital Approaches to Migrant Heritage

Biography, Cultural Studies, Historical Studies, Life Writing

Migrant Nation

Biography, Communication and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Life Writing

Coda: Data Generation