1,721,008 research outputs found
Critical legal geographies of possession : Antarctica and the International Geophysical Year 1957–1958
No full textThis is an article about the politics of territory in Antarctica. It revolves around what at first seems like a very\ud
simple geopolitical question: who owns Antarctica? As this article demonstrates, this seemingly simple\ud
question is far from easy to answer: it cannot be answered with a straightforward list of states, nor by\ud
conventional geopolitical understandings of territorial possession (Agnew and Corbridge, Mastering space:\ud
Hegemony, territory, and international political economy, 1995). Struggles between states for territorial\ud
possession has characterised much recent geopolitical history; struggles for Antarctica do not entirely follow\ud
this pattern, and revolve instead on the nature and the concept of territorial possession itself. The article\ud
focuses in particular on the debates about, and changes to, Antarctic legal and geopolitical territories triggered\ud
by the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year: before the IGY Antarctica was an unstable composite of\ud
state claims, unclaimed terra nullius , and terra nullius or land unavailable to state claim. By the 1959 Antarctic\ud
Treaty, this unstable composite legal and geopolitical geography emerged as a new form of territory, one in\ud
which the conventional global mode of territory—state possession—was no longer dominant. Understanding\ud
Antarctic legal geographies adds depth to critical geopolitical studies which focus on the ways in which space\ud
is actively constructed by specific discourses, understandings, and groups
Australia's Antarctic Turf
No full textUnlike the US, which constructs Antarctic spatiality as entirely non-sovereign; and unlike Chile, which bases its Antarctic sovereignty claim on Papal Bulls and acts of domestic colonisation, Australian Antarctic space is a spatiality of possession, founded on a bedrock of imperial exploration, representation, and law. Seventy-four years ago, the camera whirred as a man stuck a flagpole into the bleak summit rocks of a small Antarctic island: six million square kilometres of Antarctica became, and remain, Australian space
The Proclamation Island Moment: Making Antartica Australian
No full textIt is January 1930 and the restless Southern Ocean is heaving itself up against the frozen coast of Eastern Antarctica as the exploring ship Discovery shoves its way through the pack. One of the key moments of the British, Australian, and New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition (BANZARE)—is about to occur: the expedition is about to succeed in its primary mission. Douglas Mawson, the expedition's Australian leader, ascends to the island's bleak summit. There, he and his crew assemble a mound of stones and insert into it the flagpole they've carried with them across the ocean. Mawson reads an official proclamation of territorial annexation, the photographer Hurley shoots the moment on film, and one of the men hauls the Union Jack up the pole. In the freezing wind, the men take off their hats and sing "God Save the King." They deposit a copy of the proclamation into a metal canister and affix this to the flagpole. The men row back to the Discovery; Mawson returns to his cabin and writes up the event. A crucial moment in Antarctica’s spatial history has occurred: on what Mawson has aptly named Proclamation Island, Antarctica has been produced as Australian space. But how, exactly, does this production of Antarctica as a spatial possession work? How does this moment initiate the transformation of six million square kilometres of Antarctica—42% of the continent—into Australian space? The answer to this question lies in three separate, but articulated cultural technologies: representation, the body of the explorer, and international territorial law. This article attends to the ways in which these spatialising forces together 'nationalise' Antarctica by transforming it into Australian national space.\ud
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Mawson's BANZARE performance on Proclamation Island is a moment in which the legal, the physical, and the textual clearly intersect in the creation of space as a national possession. Australia did not take possession of forty-two percent of Antarctica after BANZARE by law, by exploration, or by representation alone. The Australian government built its Antarctic space with letters patent. BANZARE produced Australia's Antarctic possession through the physical and legal rituals of flag-planting, proclamation-reading, and exploration. BANZARE further contributed to Australia's polar empire with maps, journals, photos and films, and cadastral lists of the region’s animals, minerals, magnetic fields, and winds. The laws of "discovery of terra nullius" and of "the spirit of possession" coalesced these spaces into a territory officially designated as Australian. It is crucial to recognise that the production of nearly half of Antarctica as Australian space was, and is not a matter of discourse, of physical performance, or of law alone. Rather, these three cultural technologies of spatial production are mutually imbricated; none can function without the others, nor is one reducible to an epiphenomenon of another. This article examines the ways in which six million square kilometres of Antarctic ice were, and continue to be, produced as Australian national space
Review of Geographies of Australian Heritages: Loving a Sunburnt Country?, ed. Roy Jones and Brian Shaw. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007
No full textReview of Geographies of Australian Heritages: Loving a Sunburnt Country?, ed. Roy Jones and Brian Shaw. Aldershot, Ashgate, 2007
Grounding the internet : categorising the geographies of locative media
No full textTaxonometrical uncertainty is prevalent in the field of locative media, which has been variously referred to as “the geomobile web” (Crawford and Goggin, 2009), “the geoweb” (Lake et al., 2004), “Where 2.0” (O’Reilly, 2008:1), and “DigiPlace” (Zook and Graham, 2007). However, it is not only the rapid development of the technology, or the various academic disciplinary approaches to it, that have resulted in this uncertainty but also the deeply ideological debates and concerns about what locative media should and should not be.\ud
The intention of this article is to provide an overview of existing literature and research in this field in order to develop a synthetic overview of the various types of locative media, and the geographies arising from them. Not only will such taxonomy clarify communication about locative media, it will identify for developers, users, policy-makers and scholars the specific contours and affordances of the different types of locative media, as well as the issues associated with them
What Is Entertainment? The Value of Industry Definitions
No full textThis chapter starts with a seemingly basic definitional question: what is entertainment? There is no doubt that something called entertainment exists: there are sections of newspapers dedicated to it, television shows about it, and professional associations for it. Entertainment is not an obscure term for a niche genre. It is a multi-billion dollar global industry with whose products a significant portion of the world’s population engages deeply and regularly. As such, it requires substantial analysis, investigation, and explanation. This analysis is the task of the Palgrave Entertainment Industries series, of which this book and this chapter are a part. Despite the size and cultural penetration of entertainment, to date, the depth and volume of academic investigations of entertainment remain surprisingly insubstantial. Academic analyses of entertainment exist, but they are scattered among disciplines, lumped into the much broader categories of ‘media studies’ or ‘popular culture’, or focussed on a single subsector such as television or music. This chapter contributes to a better understanding of entertainment as a complex cultural system. This effort involves investigating how entertainment works as an industry, how its products circulate, and how it is understood
Creativity and the Australian suburbs : the appeal of suburban localities for the creative industries workforce
No full textThe locus of creative inspiration and production is commonly associated with either the dynamism of the inner city or with the natural landscape, with its Arcadian transformative associations. This article considers the spatiality of creative work in an in-between site: the outer suburbs in Australia. The outer suburbs occupy a conflicted status in the national imaginary: frequently regarded as the locus of consumption and materialism, they are localities which few associate with creativity or creative industries. Creative city discourse further instils the idea that all things creative occur only in the inner city. Yet Australia is a highly suburbanised country: the middle and outer suburbs are where most Australians live and work. This article challenges the perception that creativity is spatially clustered in the inner city. It is based on empirical and qualitative research that maps and investigates the experience of creative industries workers in outer-suburban localities of Brisbane and Melbourne. One of the key findings is the significance of the relationship between work and place for creative workers located in outer-suburban localities, rupturing assumptions about suburbia and “creative” inner-city enclaves
Entertainment industries : entertainment as a cultural system
No full textEntertainment Industries is the first book to map entertainment as a cultural system. Including work from world-renowned analysts such as Henry Jenkins and Jonathan Gray, this innovative collection explains what entertainment is and how it works. \ud
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Entertainment is audience-centred culture. The Entertainment Industries are a uniquely interdisciplinary collection of evolving businesses that openly monitor evolving cultural trends and work within them. The producers of entertainment – central to that practice– are the new artists. They understand audiences and combine creative, business and legal skills in order to produce cultural products that cater to them.\ud
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Entertainment Industries describes the characteristics of entertainment, the systems that produce it, and the role of producers and audiences in its development, as well as explaining the importance of this area of study, and how it might be better integrated into Universities.\ud
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Fans teaching fans how to consume : the role of ritual in the consumption of entertainment
No full textThe status of entertainment as both a dimension of human culture, and a booming global industry is increasing. Given more recent consumer-centric definitions of entertainment, the entertainment consumer has grown in prominence and is now coming under closer scrutiny. However viewing entertainment consumers as always behaving in a similar fashion towards entertainment as to other products may be selling them short. For a start, entertainment consumers can exhibit a strong loyalty towards their favourite entertainment products that is the envy of the marketing world. Academic researchers and marketers who are keen to investigate entertainment consumers would benefit from a theoretical base from which to commence. This essay therefore, takes a consumer-oriented focus in defining entertainment and conceptualises a model of entertainment consumption.\ud
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In approaching the study of entertainment one axiomatic question remains: how should we define it? Richard Dyer notes that, considering that the category of entertainment can include – by its own definition in the song ‘That’s entertainment!’ – everything from Hamlet and Oedipus Rex to ‘the clown with his pants falling down’ and ‘the lights on the lady in tights’, it doesn’t make much sense to try to define entertainment as being marked by particular textual features (as is done, for example, by Avrich, 2002). Dyer’s position is rather that ‘entertainment is not so much a category of things as an attitude towards things’ (Dyer, 1973: 9). He traces the modern conception of entertainment back to the writings of Molière. This writer defended the purpose of his plays against attacks from the church that they were not sufficiently edifying by insisting that, as entertainments he had no interest in edifying audiences – his ‘real purpose …was to provide people pleasure – and the definition of that was to be decided by “the people”’(Dyer, 1973: 9). \ud
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In my own discipline of Marketing this approach has been embraced – Kaser and Oelkers, for example, define entertainment as ‘whatever people are willing to spend their money and spare time viewing’ (2008, 18). That is the approach taken in this paper, where I see entertainment as ‘consumer-driven culture’ (McKee and Collis, 2009) – a definition that is closely aligned with the marketing concept. Within a marketing framework I explore what the consumption of entertainment can tell us about the relationships between consumers and culture more generally. For entertainment offers an intriguing case study, and is often consumed in ways that challenge many of our assumptions about marketing and consumer behaviour
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