WEDNESDAY AUGUST 28 2024 | INSTORE EVENT
6.00pm for a 6.30pm start | 60mins
Join us for a discussion about the the present state of and the future of Feminism in Australian Society. Scholars Dr Alex Bevan and Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu will be on our panel to discuss this most important subject.
ABOUT THE EVENT
This new conversation series brings together experts in their feild to discuss trends, major innovations and future predictions in a given field. Our August conversation is about the field of feminism. Important thinkers in this field from Brisbane will discuss their understandings of their work and feminism in general as it stands today, the trends they have spotted and their predictions for the role of feminism into the future. What specifics of thought and practice will be important in a changing society?
The group will also recommend books to help you understand their chosen field so you will come away with a reading list for your own personal study.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
DR ALEX BEVAN
Dr Alex Bevan’s research focuses on the relationship among gender, technological change and space. How do new technologies inform the design and representation of space? How are media portrayals of women often used as a vehicle for addressing technological change and transformations in lived space? Her methodological approaches combine textual analysis (looking at media content) with more industry-facing, hands-on approaches to answering these questions. For example, she draws on industry interviews, industry conversations about designing space, and analyses of lived spaces.
Her first book The Aesthetics of TV Nostalgia (Bloomsbury, 2019) is an industry ethnography of the people designing sets and costumes for nostalgic US television programmes. She addresses how questions around gender play out on television alongside larger concerns around historical progress and regress that are attached to technological change. You can find her other publications in the areas of television representations of gender, the female body in narratives around nationhood, online archives and how they relate to gender, fashion history, surveillance, and creative work in television history in Adaptation, Television & New Media, Feminist Media Studies, Cinema Journal, Continuum, Surveillance & Society and Convergence.
Her current project turns to representations of gender violence in popular media and how these portrayals offer repeated patterns in the ways women, technology and space are presented. She looks at depictions of stranger violence and domestic violence, as well as safety discourses in technology and spatial design to discuss how the violated female body becomes attached to social understandings of public and private space and changes in communication technologies. The binary of domestic violence and stranger violence as it is constructed in media and design, hinders and derails public attention and policy. The way violence against women is represented in media tells us repeated stories around what spaces are safe, how women's movements should be trackable with technology, and whom is at fault or responsible. An ongoing and in depth analysis of these portrayals is pressing if we are to address gender violence in a holistic way that considers gender violence narratives as well as how media technology and spatial design are positioned as deterrents.
Her 2015 article, The National Body, Women and Mental Health in Homeland, draws connections among the distressed or unstable gendered body, space and digital technologies. Dr Bevan argues that the representation of women’s mental health in the series and other examples of television acts as a stand-in for representing the elusive properties of territoriality, mobility across international borders, and conflict that typify digital era warfare. Media representations of women’s bodies, “reconstruct the sense of territory and bodies under surveillance to address topics like networks and security, which tend to elude representability. This is particularly true of digital-era warfare and surveillance, which defy spatial representability because they cannot be reduced to one event in a single time and place...The female body and mental health in millennial "quality television" vehicularize contemporary anxieties around definitions of citizenship in the war on terror”
In the School of Communication and Arts, Bevan teaches Multimedia (year one) and Digital Project (year three), which centre on embedding critical perspectives on contemporary and old media into creative and collaborative design processes. Working as producers, designers, marketers, and more within these projects, students experience the industries that are often invisible in creation and discussion of media, considering the forces and definitions of labour that impact their desired outputs.
Dr GIANG NGUYEN-THU
Dr Giang Nguyen-Thu is a DECRA Research Fellow at the School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. She is affiliated with the Center for Digital Cultures and Societies, UQ.
Dr Nguyen-Thu is currently working on her DECRA project “Too quick or too slow: Digital temporalities in networked Vietnam” (2024-2027). For this project, she explores the multiple, tangled, and contesting temporalities, or the lived experiences of time, on the ground of digital development in Vietnam. Through various case studies, she will investigate digital temporalities as plotted on the interstices of social habits, historical burdens, infrastructural layers, and human subjectivities to challenge the illusion of frictionless technological expansion.
Dr Nguyen-Thu’s interest in the cultural politics of digital time-making stems from her lasting curiosity about the interplay between media and the rapid process of economic development in Vietnam after the Reform (Đổi Mới) in 1986. Her first monograph, Television in Post-Reform Vietnam: Nation, Media, Market (Routledge 2019), explores how the advent of popular television reshapes the sense of national belonging in Vietnam. This monograph is the first scholarly book about contemporary Vietnamese media in the English language.
In addition to her independent research, Dr Nguyen-Thu serves as a chief investigator of the collaborative ARC Discover Project “Digital Transaction Platforms in Asia” (2022-2026), led by Assoc. Prof Adrian Athique. For this DP project, she investigates the gendered dimensions of digital transactions in Vietnam, focusing on the experiences of male delivery workers and female online retailers.
