Screen vs Life

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 ...

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 ...

Only days after thousands of Australian’s gathered in solidarity with their female comrades in the US to protest the inauguration of Trump , throngs of people have returned to key city centers throughout the Australia to protest the celebration of nationhood on the anniversary of colonial conquest.  While the rest of the nation fire’s up the bbq in their backyards, local parks, or at the beach, in honour of Australia Day, protesters stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their Indigenous country men and women, to remember the 26th of January as a day of invasion, as a day of loss, and a day of mourning. While this particular protest has become a decades old tradition, this year it comes after a string of protests that have led me to understand protest as a lifestyle choice more so than a meaningful strategy for political change. Behold, the irony of one country protesting the democratic election of another country's leader There are three key factors that lead me to thi...