Screen vs Life

Dutifully and begrudgingly masked up to run necessary errands in Coburg, I regularly encounter fellow Melbournian’s with their masks around their chins chugging on their cigarette as though their life depended on it. And I don’t say this to complain of loopholes in Melbourne’s emergency laws, or to demand tougher penalties for those not properly wearing their masks. If you want to smoke while wearing your mask as an ankle bracelet, I couldn’t give a monkey’s left testicle. I do however highlight this particular type of encounter because it highlights the ludicrous principle underpinning mandatory masks. We must wear masks, we are told, to protect others . Because masks limit opportunities of unknowingly spreading coronavirus - not catching coronavirus - the principle is that we take responsibility for the health of others . In fact, it is selfish to speak of personal responsibility for one’s own health. And as Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton is fond of repeating, taking re

There has been a discernible change in Melbourne, and not for the better. As I smile at fellow customers in the super market, or greet neighbors as I walk down my street very few people greet or smile back. In fact, it would seem that most people have decided that it is too scary to even make eye contact lest THE COVID leaps from my body and into their eyeballs. Only a week ago, while careful to maintain their distance, strangers still smiled at each other and joked about the strange times that we had come to live through. So why the change? Whether or not you agree with the recent measures taken by Daniel Andrews’ Government in Victoria, there are a few rhetorical strategies utilized by this government, and indeed, the mainstream media, to galvanize support for the return to lockdown, and which is successfully driving a wedge between citizens, neighbors and families.   Take for example oft repeated phrase that our medical workers are “on the frontline”. What does it mean to insist tha

Competition has, in the humanities, become a very dirty word. Along with the notion of personal responsibility, it is largely denounced as a somewhat unnatural proscription of neoliberal policies that has been foisted upon academics and cultural workers, who are believed to be more inclined towards collaboration and cooperation.  Competition is here characterized as a cut-throat practice where individuals engage in malevolent and underhanded tactics to greedily accumulate resources for themselves to the detriment of everyone else. Competition is understood as a fundamental characteristic of free market capitalism; a zero-sum game which atomizes communities and valorizes narcissistic self-interest. This understanding of competition as the opposite of cooperation is a dire misunderstanding of the concept. It is a misunderstanding that underwrites the social justice activism of many humanities scholars, and the astonishing delusion that they are above such base practices.

Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) is the nation’s multicultural public broadcaster, and as such, its core mandate is to “inform, educate and entertain all Australians, and in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society” ( SBS Charter  ).  Like other public broadcasters, Britain's BBC and Australia's ABC for example, SBS was instituted as a public sphere, the function of which is to uphold liberal democratic values by providing a forum of free speech within which everyone can debate matters of collective importance, as equals, irrespective of their political views. In principle, the explicit multicultural mandate of SBS recognized that such equality had not historically been afforded to those with non-English speaking backgrounds, and attempted to rectify this lack of access to the public sphere by featuring non-white faces and voices.  Yesterday, I read a couple of articles circulated by SBS on Facebook which seems to indicate that the custod

Today I read a BBC article entitled “ How Economics Killed the Antibiotic Dream ” wherein the author characterizes the impending antibiotic crisis - fueled by factory farming practices - as an outcome of greed and free market capitalism. This argument is subject to some of the same flaws as the one which advocates the introduction of taxes to curb the consumption of meat - and sugar for that matter - as a means to address a different health crisis: obesity. The article points to increasing Western wealth as the source of the problem, arguing that as average household incomes increase, demand for meat increases, incentivizing farmers to increase their supply. Brutal factory farming techniques are the logical outcome of such demand as farmers rush to cash in on the potential profit and supply this demand. According to this narrative, this directly leads to the use of low dose antibiotics to curb the spread of disease among the animals, who are kept in extraordinarily unsanitary

Cultural Policy Studies emerged as a distinct subfield within Cultural Studies in the early 1990s, and is distinguished from its parent field by its focus on activism through policy. Adherents of cultural studies have traditionally aimed to illuminate how power is maintained by an elite few in the West through its examination of cultural practices and meanings. Cultural policy studies goes one step further and involves itself within the institutions that actively regulate the cultural industries such that the inequalities exposed through cultural studies scholarship might be eliminated. The huge problem with this approach is that it is a blatant program of social engineering, and one which lacks any foundation of ethical principles to guide its practitioners.  Insofar as the field is founded upon the philosophies of the French postmodern thinkers of the 1960s and 70s such as Michel Foucault, who deny the possibility of objective truth, cultural value (criteria of artistic exce