Tara Brabazon
Tara Brabazon is the Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University, Trustee of the Graduate Women Manawatu Trust, Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Director of the Popular Culture Collective.
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Books by Tara Brabazon
In such a time, how can PhD students survive - and thrive? This audiobook takes the difficult states - that are often a full stop in a career, personal and professional life - such as disappointment, jealousy, narcissism and fear. These often career-ending experiences are addressed and transformed as a 'comma' state. A pause. A moment of reflection. A platform for transformation of a career and research.
Information literacy is about as attractive as teeth extraction. However, for PhD students and citizens more generally, information literacy enables us to sift and sort knowledge from opinion, and expertise from a vibe.
Know What You Do Not Know: Information Literacy for PhD Students provides a context around the folk devils of our time: plagiarism, self-plagiarism, influencers and populists. Most importantly, Know What You Do Not Know demonstrates how to take notes, how to reference with clarity, and how to build an opinion into a referenced and considered argument.
The space between students and supervisors is vexed and volatile.Ā Ā
It can be exploitative. The Pernicious PhD Supervisor enters this difficult space and provides both the models and the strategies to categorize and manage difficult supervisors and supervisory practices.Ā Ā
From the Flamingo to the Wizard, from the White Pointer Shark to the Bower Bird, ten models of supervision are revealed.Ā Ā
Part horror and part comedy, this book opens the weeping wound of doctoral education, to salve and heal the consequences of problematic research cultures.
Trump Studies addresses this key question; probing the value of thinking, reading, writing and interpretation during times of economic, social and political uncertainty. With a compelling voice and academic rigour, the authors explore how and why xenophobia and sexism are the grammar of contemporary popular culture and politics.
The Brexit result and the Trump victory cannot be studied in a laboratory; the silent majority will not sit in a petri dish, waiting to be researched. The theories and methodologies developed into this book not only explain these two mega and meta events, they create space for ideas that challenge and dissent, and make the case for the role and value of universities in a time when evidence, expertise and facts often dissolve into opinion, emotion and fake news.
Donald Trump does not matter. Trump Studies does matter - and this is a siren call to all intellectuals to intervene and transform the currency of theory in empiricist times.
We live in panicked times, not careful times. While excessive food may be the basis of a moral panic about obesity, too much information is rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously, plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and information literacy, students and citizens wade through low quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable intellectual challenge, imagination and critique. Satisfied and compliant, they are not aware that other types of information are available. The task of Digital Dieting: From information obesity to intellectual fitness is to demonstrate the social, political and scholarly difficulties in managing large quantities of low quality information. Yet this is not a book that diagnoses crisis, excess and banality. Instead, the aim is to provide strategies to develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal.
This book presents two intertwined premises to consider.
(1) Decisions about teaching and learning have been automated, blocking reflection of what, how and why particular ideas are taught in particular ways. Therefore, it is necessary to bring the consciousness and consideration back to media and information selection.
(2) Fewer media create more meaning. One way to return the consciousness and reflection to education is to not only reduce the automation but question the assumption that more media, platforms, software, hardware and applications always improves teaching and learning. Re-empowering teachers and librarians in the construction of teaching, learning, media and assessment choices will stop software and hardware, managers and administrators ignoring the importance of information and media literacies.
From these maxims, the book offers two actions to commence a digital diet. Firstly, teachers, students and citizens must reduce the automated choices made within templates, applications and search engines. Simply because software or hardware is invented does not mean it must be used. Secondly, it is important to recognize that the internet has created resources beyond what any of us could have imagined in a local library, yet the provision of information and media literacy has not increased to a similar scale to manage this proliferation.
Digital Dieting: from information obesity to intellectual fitness provides active, conscious, careful and applicable strategies, options and opportunities to move students and citizens from searching to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.
_City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ has been edited by Professor Tara Brabazon and written by a team of experienced and innovative researchers with the aim of understanding cities as they are, rather than how they are marketed or branded. Certainly, all cities have much in common. Yet the differences are important, imaginative, marketed, promoted, mediated and transformed.
City imaging is a phrase that is increasingly used in public discourse, but it is rarely defined. It refers to how particular cities are branded and marketed. It is a theory of cities based on an assumption: representations can be transformed and sold, often for the purposes of tourism or attracting corporations and in-demand workers to one city over another. It is an imprecise science. Subjectivity, impressions, bias and prejudice floods the vista of the mind. Similarly, the visuality of a city often overwhelms the sounds, touch, taste and feel of urbanity. Different senses operate in some cities and not others. For Singapore, thick and humid air predominates. In Detroit, the greyness of industrialization ā from the historic motor plants or techno music ā saturates the visual palette.
The taste, smell, sounds and architectural iconography of a place align to construct an image of a city. The task for researchers and policy makers is to use or transform this image, to market the city as a tourist destination for music, sport, beaches or relaxation. Such a project is difficult. Words like regionality, deterritorialization, postindustrialization and decline confirm such a complexity. These words and phrases capture the panicked acceleration of contemporary life. Histories squeeze and loop. Geographies crack and morph. Yet after the war on terror, credit crunch and recession, it is necessary to quietly and patiently survey the wreckage of the 2000s.
Through fear, panic, ignorance, mobility and speed, cities matter. While the deterritorialization of the web enables the movement of money, music and ideas over national borders, cities remain important. _City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ explores the iconography of urbanity and what happens when branding is emphasized over living"
It is timely for such a monograph. In August 2001, Tara Brabazon, the editor of this book, published an academic article titled āHow imagined are virtual communities?ā The date is important. This was a key period of transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Cutting through these clichĆ©s, the article emerged just as the read-write web entered popular cultural currency. At that time, most consumers of websites were not producers. Most online activities were searching, reading and viewing, rather than commenting, writing and uploading. This article sketched provisional theoretical work on how Benedict Andersonās landmark monograph Imagined Communities could be translated into the burgeoning web environment. Anderson, in reviewing how formerly colonised people āinventedā nations to resist, reclaim and reinvigorate the languages, traditions and histories smashed by the colonisers, summoned the phrase Imagined Communities. He showed how arbitrary ā yet integral ā these imaginings became in creating and reinforcing moments and monuments of resistance and challenge.
Andersonās arguments about language, power and colonisation can be migrated to the next century. But caution is required. Since the editorās 2001 article, the web has matured. It is television with a cursor. It is a jukebox with a slot to swipe a credit card. It is a shop that delivers. It is a lover that texts commitment. But the web is also part of popular culture, weaving passion into interactivity. It has embedded into the life of millions and added further layers of exclusion and disconnection for the already disempowered. The exclusion of particular people becomes serious - more serious - when assumptions of connectivity and web literacy permeate governmental, commercial and educational institutions.
Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets enters the rapidly maturing social media environment and documents the quest ā if not the reality ā of community. It also notes that alongside every engaged, connected and supportive group are those who are excluded, marginalised, ridiculed or forgotten. The quest for authenticity for some layers injustice for others.
There is productive research to be completed in this moment of transformation. The writers in this collection probe the concept of community when it is imagined and imagining, disconnected from physical territory. Particularly, there is attention ā recognising the events in the Middle East in early 2011 ā on how social media creates political consciousness and how this consciousness manifests into social change both on and offline. The goal is not to segregate digital and analogue spaces and identities, but to look for productive, imaginative and creative relationships between these spheres.
The contributors enter digital microenvironments to explore the desires for connection and communication. They explore the quest for authenticity. Our task is to probe how technology redraws the boundaries between connection, consciousness and community. Put more clearly, and summoning one of the fathers of cultural studies, we test Raymond Williamsā maxim that, āthe process of communication is in fact the process of community.ā We do not assume that a community (inevitably) emerges from communication. We do not assume political change evolves from consciousness. Instead, the researchers in this collection open new spaces for thinking about language, identity and social connections.
A review of this book from Dancecult is available at: https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/135/183
In such a time, how can PhD students survive - and thrive? This audiobook takes the difficult states - that are often a full stop in a career, personal and professional life - such as disappointment, jealousy, narcissism and fear. These often career-ending experiences are addressed and transformed as a 'comma' state. A pause. A moment of reflection. A platform for transformation of a career and research.
Information literacy is about as attractive as teeth extraction. However, for PhD students and citizens more generally, information literacy enables us to sift and sort knowledge from opinion, and expertise from a vibe.
Know What You Do Not Know: Information Literacy for PhD Students provides a context around the folk devils of our time: plagiarism, self-plagiarism, influencers and populists. Most importantly, Know What You Do Not Know demonstrates how to take notes, how to reference with clarity, and how to build an opinion into a referenced and considered argument.
The space between students and supervisors is vexed and volatile.Ā Ā
It can be exploitative. The Pernicious PhD Supervisor enters this difficult space and provides both the models and the strategies to categorize and manage difficult supervisors and supervisory practices.Ā Ā
From the Flamingo to the Wizard, from the White Pointer Shark to the Bower Bird, ten models of supervision are revealed.Ā Ā
Part horror and part comedy, this book opens the weeping wound of doctoral education, to salve and heal the consequences of problematic research cultures.
Trump Studies addresses this key question; probing the value of thinking, reading, writing and interpretation during times of economic, social and political uncertainty. With a compelling voice and academic rigour, the authors explore how and why xenophobia and sexism are the grammar of contemporary popular culture and politics.
The Brexit result and the Trump victory cannot be studied in a laboratory; the silent majority will not sit in a petri dish, waiting to be researched. The theories and methodologies developed into this book not only explain these two mega and meta events, they create space for ideas that challenge and dissent, and make the case for the role and value of universities in a time when evidence, expertise and facts often dissolve into opinion, emotion and fake news.
Donald Trump does not matter. Trump Studies does matter - and this is a siren call to all intellectuals to intervene and transform the currency of theory in empiricist times.
We live in panicked times, not careful times. While excessive food may be the basis of a moral panic about obesity, too much information is rarely discussed as a crisis of a similar scale. Obviously, plentiful and high quality food is not a problem if eating is balanced with exercise. But without the skills of media and information literacy, students and citizens wade through low quality online information that fills their day yet does not enable intellectual challenge, imagination and critique. Satisfied and compliant, they are not aware that other types of information are available. The task of Digital Dieting: From information obesity to intellectual fitness is to demonstrate the social, political and scholarly difficulties in managing large quantities of low quality information. Yet this is not a book that diagnoses crisis, excess and banality. Instead, the aim is to provide strategies to develop intellectual fitness that sorts the important from the irrelevant and the remarkable from the banal.
This book presents two intertwined premises to consider.
(1) Decisions about teaching and learning have been automated, blocking reflection of what, how and why particular ideas are taught in particular ways. Therefore, it is necessary to bring the consciousness and consideration back to media and information selection.
(2) Fewer media create more meaning. One way to return the consciousness and reflection to education is to not only reduce the automation but question the assumption that more media, platforms, software, hardware and applications always improves teaching and learning. Re-empowering teachers and librarians in the construction of teaching, learning, media and assessment choices will stop software and hardware, managers and administrators ignoring the importance of information and media literacies.
From these maxims, the book offers two actions to commence a digital diet. Firstly, teachers, students and citizens must reduce the automated choices made within templates, applications and search engines. Simply because software or hardware is invented does not mean it must be used. Secondly, it is important to recognize that the internet has created resources beyond what any of us could have imagined in a local library, yet the provision of information and media literacy has not increased to a similar scale to manage this proliferation.
Digital Dieting: from information obesity to intellectual fitness provides active, conscious, careful and applicable strategies, options and opportunities to move students and citizens from searching to researching, sharing to thinking, and shopping to reading.
_City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ has been edited by Professor Tara Brabazon and written by a team of experienced and innovative researchers with the aim of understanding cities as they are, rather than how they are marketed or branded. Certainly, all cities have much in common. Yet the differences are important, imaginative, marketed, promoted, mediated and transformed.
City imaging is a phrase that is increasingly used in public discourse, but it is rarely defined. It refers to how particular cities are branded and marketed. It is a theory of cities based on an assumption: representations can be transformed and sold, often for the purposes of tourism or attracting corporations and in-demand workers to one city over another. It is an imprecise science. Subjectivity, impressions, bias and prejudice floods the vista of the mind. Similarly, the visuality of a city often overwhelms the sounds, touch, taste and feel of urbanity. Different senses operate in some cities and not others. For Singapore, thick and humid air predominates. In Detroit, the greyness of industrialization ā from the historic motor plants or techno music ā saturates the visual palette.
The taste, smell, sounds and architectural iconography of a place align to construct an image of a city. The task for researchers and policy makers is to use or transform this image, to market the city as a tourist destination for music, sport, beaches or relaxation. Such a project is difficult. Words like regionality, deterritorialization, postindustrialization and decline confirm such a complexity. These words and phrases capture the panicked acceleration of contemporary life. Histories squeeze and loop. Geographies crack and morph. Yet after the war on terror, credit crunch and recession, it is necessary to quietly and patiently survey the wreckage of the 2000s.
Through fear, panic, ignorance, mobility and speed, cities matter. While the deterritorialization of the web enables the movement of money, music and ideas over national borders, cities remain important. _City Imaging: Regeneration, Renewal, Decay_ explores the iconography of urbanity and what happens when branding is emphasized over living"
It is timely for such a monograph. In August 2001, Tara Brabazon, the editor of this book, published an academic article titled āHow imagined are virtual communities?ā The date is important. This was a key period of transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. Cutting through these clichĆ©s, the article emerged just as the read-write web entered popular cultural currency. At that time, most consumers of websites were not producers. Most online activities were searching, reading and viewing, rather than commenting, writing and uploading. This article sketched provisional theoretical work on how Benedict Andersonās landmark monograph Imagined Communities could be translated into the burgeoning web environment. Anderson, in reviewing how formerly colonised people āinventedā nations to resist, reclaim and reinvigorate the languages, traditions and histories smashed by the colonisers, summoned the phrase Imagined Communities. He showed how arbitrary ā yet integral ā these imaginings became in creating and reinforcing moments and monuments of resistance and challenge.
Andersonās arguments about language, power and colonisation can be migrated to the next century. But caution is required. Since the editorās 2001 article, the web has matured. It is television with a cursor. It is a jukebox with a slot to swipe a credit card. It is a shop that delivers. It is a lover that texts commitment. But the web is also part of popular culture, weaving passion into interactivity. It has embedded into the life of millions and added further layers of exclusion and disconnection for the already disempowered. The exclusion of particular people becomes serious - more serious - when assumptions of connectivity and web literacy permeate governmental, commercial and educational institutions.
Digital Dialogues and Community 2.0: After Avatars, Trolls and Puppets enters the rapidly maturing social media environment and documents the quest ā if not the reality ā of community. It also notes that alongside every engaged, connected and supportive group are those who are excluded, marginalised, ridiculed or forgotten. The quest for authenticity for some layers injustice for others.
There is productive research to be completed in this moment of transformation. The writers in this collection probe the concept of community when it is imagined and imagining, disconnected from physical territory. Particularly, there is attention ā recognising the events in the Middle East in early 2011 ā on how social media creates political consciousness and how this consciousness manifests into social change both on and offline. The goal is not to segregate digital and analogue spaces and identities, but to look for productive, imaginative and creative relationships between these spheres.
The contributors enter digital microenvironments to explore the desires for connection and communication. They explore the quest for authenticity. Our task is to probe how technology redraws the boundaries between connection, consciousness and community. Put more clearly, and summoning one of the fathers of cultural studies, we test Raymond Williamsā maxim that, āthe process of communication is in fact the process of community.ā We do not assume that a community (inevitably) emerges from communication. We do not assume political change evolves from consciousness. Instead, the researchers in this collection open new spaces for thinking about language, identity and social connections.
A review of this book from Dancecult is available at: https://dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/view/135/183
Actually, we live in an age of information obesity. Text messages. Tweets. Facebook updates. LinkedIn contacts. Emails. These digital interruptions are the punctuation of our analogue life. In such an environment, teaching and learning - curriculum and assessment - lurches from one āinnovationā to the next, often without reflection, consideration or respect for history, professionalism or educational outcomes.
My keynote address enters this supermarket of digital excess. We probe information obesity. But then, we enter a digital detox and conclude with digital dieting. The goal is to find the most potent and powerful assessment that develops learning, literacy and cultware, rather than frustration, interruption and software.
Five courses were completed: Managing as a Coach, Setting Expectations & Assessing Performance Issues, Coaching Practices, Coaching Conversations, Designing and Implementing Your Coaching Strategy.