What does it mean to have a creative relationship with the past?
How do 21st century institutions manage our cultural heritage?
I asked Jacinta Sutton, Gavin Bannerman, and Laura Daenke of the State Library of Queensland.
Call them the Memory Squad.
Tag: interview
Marvellous, Electrical: Hesam Fetrati
This week’s Marvellous, Electrical interviewee is Hesam Fetrati, an Iranian satirist based in Brisbane.
Marvellous, Electrical: Scratch and Hope, part 1
The first of a three-part series: VW Beetles, artistry, engineering, and stories of migration at Marvellous, Electrical this week.
No Longer at Ease / The Life of Lines – Interview with Beth Povinelli
Frontier Imaginaries is an exhibition currently being held across two sites in Brisbane: ‘No Longer at Ease‘ in the Institute of Modern Art and ‘The Life of Lines‘ at Queensland University of Technology.
Beth Povinelli is one of the artists featured in ‘The Life of Lines‘ – she is also Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University.
Beth’s research forms a critique of late liberalism – she dubs it an ‘anthropology of the otherwise’ – which I find vital to current debates about Australian identities and our visions of the future, both here and around the world. At the launch of Frontier Imaginaries, she argued that Australia is on the front lines of a crisis in Western thought, brought about in part by the pressures of climate change and the rise of digital technology.
Originally a philosophy student, Beth’s love of Australian movies led her to visit the country on a grant application in 1984. She eventually found herself working as an anthropologist and advocate for Indigenous communities. As she says, her career has been less about “explaining” Indigenous culture and society to others, more about helping to analyze how late liberal power appears from an Indigenous perspective.
Marvellous, Electrical: Everything’s Coming Up Kransky
What links country Queensland, Barbarella, Judge Judy, and Agnes Bernelle, the World War 2 broadcaster who convinced a U-Boat captain to surrender with nothing more than her seductive voice?
On this week’s Marvellous, Electrical, I interview Australia’s greatest contemporary cabaret act.
Marvellous, Electrical: Mouth on Legs
There have been great Queenslanders and famous Queenslanders, real ones and imaginary, but only one has been to the end of the universe and back.
This week’s Marvellous, Electrical is about Tegan from Doctor Who.
TEGAN: What’s a Zero Room anyway?[…]
NYSSA: I suppose it’s some sort of neutral environment. An isolated space cut off from the rest of the universe.
TEGAN: He should’ve told me that’s what he wanted. I could’ve shown him Brisbane.
Read Marvellous, Electrical: Mouth on Legs here.
We The Humanities: Interview with Simon Groth, if:book
This week you can find me over at @wethehumanities, a rotating Twitter account where people working in the humanities get to share ideas, experiences, and stories. I’m using my week to talk about the grey areas between fact and fiction, dream and experience, stories and everyday life – as well as people who cross back and forth over the walls of universities and academic institutions.
Today we’re joined by Simon Groth, a Brisbane-based writer and editor who also leads if:book Australia, exploring the future of literature in the digital age.
Simon is currently completing a doctoral thesis at Queensland University of Technology, which “sits somewhere between creative writing and media studies.”
He explains:
I’m looking at how digital tools can be (and are being) used to change the relationship between writers and readers. In particular, I’ve been fascinated by the technical innovation of experimental writers from around the 1960s. These writers took radical steps such as removing the binding of books in order to give the reader greater control over the narrative.
Part of what I’m investigating is how contemporary digital tools can bring greater nuance and subtlety to this kind of innovation. It also means I have to write a novel-length work without a predetermined order of chapters, which at some point I’ll be turning over to a small group of ‘play testers’. Basically, it’s been a three-year study into how I like to make things difficult for myself.
We The Humanities: Interview with Ludi Price, City University London
This week you can find me over at @wethehumanities, a rotating Twitter account where people working in the humanities get to share ideas, experiences, and stories. I’m using my week to talk about the grey areas between fact and fiction, dream and experience, stories and everyday life – as well as people who cross back and forth over the walls of universities and academic institutions.
Today I’m joined by Ludi Price, who is a fanfiction writer, doctoral candidate at City University’s School of Library & Information Studies, and also works as a librarian in the Far Eastern Languages collection at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
Ludi began by telling me about her doctoral thesis.
In a nutshell it’s about the information behaviour of fans on the internet. That means, how fans create, collect, organise, disseminate and share information on digital platforms. Of course, information can be instantiated in many different forms, from books to magazines to wikis to library catalogues – and much, much more. A lot of the information fans deal with are fanworks (what might be termed derivative, fan-created works, such as fanart and fanfiction), and, almost by their very nature, the circulation of these cultural artefacts is through, for and by informal channels. In an age of crowdsourcing and social tagging, this is something that is very interesting to me.
How did you come to choose fandom as a topic?
In short because I’m a fan myself! It’s been a huge part of my life since I was a child, when I used to write Malory Towers and Sailor Moon fanfiction, and draw Little Mermaid fanart. Read more
We The Humanities: Interview with Natasha Barrett, University of Leicester
This week you can find me over at @wethehumanities, a rotating Twitter account where people working in the humanities get to share ideas, experiences, and stories. I’m using my week to talk about the grey areas between fact and fiction, dream and experience, stories and everyday life – as well as people who cross back and forth over the walls of universities and academic institutions.
Today I’m joined by Natasha Barrett, a British researcher and cultural heritage expert currently studying for a doctorate at the University of Leicester.
Natasha tells me:
I’m researching commercial colonial-era photographs (1860s-1914) of Māori (the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand) and their taonga/cultural treasures. Essentially I’m looking at the meaning of these photographs to Māori, and how they have been used over time both within and outside of museums. I’m also considering how Māori perspectives can inform the way these photographs are understood in museums. My approach treats photographs as three-dimensional objects. I pay close attention to their material qualities, such as the albums they are placed in, any writing on their surfaces. As well as, the sensorial or different ways people engage with photographs, inlcuding looking at, talking about and touching them.
You’ve returned to academia after a long time working in the cultural heritage sector; what’s it like returning to research and how have your experiences off-campus shaped what you do now? Read more
We The Humanities: Interview with Daisy Johnson, University of York
This week you can find me over at @wethehumanities, a rotating Twitter account where people working in the humanities get to share ideas, experiences, and stories. I’m using my week to talk about the grey areas between fact and fiction, dream and experience, stories and everyday life – as well as people who cross back and forth over the walls of universities and academic institutions.
Writer, researcher, and librarian Daisy Johnson blogs on children’s literature and literary tourism – which also happen to be her research topics as a doctoral candidate at the University of York. She began by telling me about her thesis.
I research children’s literature and literary tourism in the United Kingdom. I’m interested in what happens after the book; that moment when you visit somewhere in the real world that you’ve previously read about in a book.
I think I’ve always been interested in literary tourism without quite knowing what it is. I visited the Achensee in Austria when I was younger, solely because of my interest in the Chalet School series by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, and ever since that point, I’ve been interested in the edges of the literary experience and what happens when you experience the fictional in the real world and vice-versa.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 