Cirrus@Austlit

'This special issue is dedicated to the memory and work of Brian Shoesmith and Tom O’Regan, the founding editors of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, who sadly passed away within months of each other in 2020. At the time of his passing, Brian Shoesmith was Adjunct Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Edith Cowan University (ECU), Perth, Australia, where he is credited with developing the media department where he had worked for more than thirty years. In more recent years, he was also appointed as Dean for Academic Development and as Senior Advisor for Strategic Planning, Board of Trustees of the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB). Tom O’Regan was Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Previously, Tom had held Australian leadership positions at Murdoch University and Griffith University. Tom was Australia’s UNESCO Professor of Communication from 2001 to 2003. Both Brian and Tom had held senior leadership roles. Both had been Heads of School, Deans, and significantly are widely commended as being pioneers in the field. This special memorial issue brings together a range of notable academics that share their recollections, critical insights and engaging tributes to these pioneering scholars and mentors.' (Introduction)

'Casting an eye back on the cultural scene in Perth in the late eighties and early nineties, this article reflects on the legacy of the late Brian Shoesmith. I discuss Brian’s work on Harold A. Innis and communications theory, his interests in Asian media and Indian cinema, the research agendas he forged at Edith Cowan University and his institution building efforts later in his career. In writing this piece, I am struck now by how rich this period was in Australian communications, media and cultural studies. In this respect, the article contributes to a broader collective account of a period that registers what we have lost in the metric obsessed academy of audit cultures, performance rankings and research excellence: a shared sense of intellectual adventure between academic staff and students, an institutional environment that conditioned disciplinary experimentation (or at least remained sufficiently oblivious to activities on its margins) and a general culture of living theory. Those days seem over. Yet, by reflecting on the many activities of Brian, together with his contemporaries like Tom O’Regan and many of their generation, we might recuperate a sense of the vibrancy of that time as a possible resource in negotiating an increasingly circumscribed institutional and disciplinary horizon of the present.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper relates to my introduction to Brian Shoesmith and my involvement in his research project on satellite television and the audience reception of the Australian Television International channel in Surabaya, Indonesia in 1993 and 1995. It also discusses the impact of Brian and his research on the development of the Department of Communication in Airlangga University in Surabaya and to the transformation of television audience studies in the Indonesian context. I will examine Brian’s publications on satellite television in Asia and the account of the Australian Television International channel’s failure in Asia in the early 1990s. Taking my cue from Brian’s writings about the challenge of the Australian Television Int ernational channel in Asia, I will discuss the situation of national audiences in Indonesia and their attitude towards the persistence of imported/foreign programmes, including Australian television programmes. In fact, the consumption of Australian cultural productions in Indonesia continues to be problematic and less widespread compared to the more dominant Western (US) and Asian (Korean) productions.' (Publication abstract)

'The paper addresses the implications for the contemporary academy of changes in the organization of journal editorship. Taking the example of cultural studies and the journal Continuum, it considers the shift from the intimate ‘artisanal’ mode in which many journals have had their origins to more impersonal alienated forms, organized through market or quasi-market relations. A common interpretation of this shift is that it has been driven by the interests of large commercial publishers, who have subordinated editing to the requirements of ‘academic capitalism’. In contrast to this, the paper suggests that the demise of the artisanal mode might be understood through A.O. Hirschman’s concept of ‘exit’. Market or quasi-market forms have not been imposed but rather chosen as a response to a situation in which alienation has already occurred. The perspective allows us to see editorial work ‘after exit’ not as passively driven by external forces, but as involving its own kinds of creative choices. For the case of Continuum, particular tribute is paid in this context to the editorial direction of Brian Shoesmith.' (Publication abstract)

'Brian Shoesmith, an Australian academic, spent the last phase of his academic journey in Bangladesh. He contributed to developing a new Media Studies and Journalism department in a relatively new private university in Bangladesh. Also, he served as an academic adviser in the University of Liberal Arts (ULAB). He initiated to publish an anthology on Bangladeshi media and culture which was first of its kind. This article reviews Brian Shoesmith’s contributions to Bangladeshi media and cultural studies. The writer, a Bangladeshi scholar, contributed to the volume edited by Brian Shoesmith and they jointly wrote a book. Brian Shoesmith’s teaching and research philosophies are also explored in the paper.' (Publication abstract)

'A personal appreciation of the work and legacy of Tom O’Regan, focusing on his 1994 essay “Two or Three Things I Know About Meaning”. Although O’Regan’s work is often described as being concerned primarily with social discourses and institutional contexts in the landscape of audiovisual media, he also paid close attention to the mechanisms of film and TV texts. His view of meaning was complex and multi-factorial, reflecting both his intellectual approach and his personal temperament.' (Publication abstract)

'In this short tribute to the work of Tom O’Regan, I focus on his earliest publications, in the decade from the mid-1980s. This was both the time I knew him best and the period when he wrote most discursively and theoretically.' (Publication abstract)

'This article focuses upon the context within which much of Tom O’Regan’s early work took place, and which this work helped to frame. The importance of a particular formation of cultural nationalism to the beginnings of media and cultural studies in Australia is no longer front of mind for most of us today as we confront the challenges of a dramatically reconfigured transnational media landscape. However, it was particularly important to the development of these fields over the 1980s and 1990s. Initially most closely collected with the case being made for government support of the resurgent Australian film industry, it also became crucial to what was a distinctive field of concentration of work in Australian media studies: the link between a critical media studies and an interest in the formation of cultural policy in the national interest. The article discusses this tendency in, and its influence upon, Tom O’Regan’s pioneering contribution to Australian film, media and cultural studies, before turning to the more recent shifts that took place in his work as it went beyond cultural nationalism to engage with the emerging issues around the rise of the platform.' (Publication abstract)

'This short reflective piece revisits Tom O’Regan’s article “Some Reflections on the ‘Policy Moment’” from 1992. Tom’s intervention in the cultural policy debate which raged at that time was magisterial, wide ranging and inclusive. He saw the argument for policy to frame engaged scholarly activity as limiting the social relevance of the humanities and social sciences. Whereas the traditional ‘inclusive and abstract’ injunction to be relevant was fashioned in such a way as not to prescribe the form of engagement, the policy injunction limits relevance to what ‘can be made actionable, publicly endorsed, institutionally sanctioned and found useful by government tribunals, policy-makers and other actors directly involved in the policy process’. This narrowing, he argued, misrecognises the multifaceted nature of policy formation and debate. I reflect on how Tom’s position, and that of Meaghan Morris, has influenced me subsequently through a brief discussion of various scholarly personae that the engaged scholar can adopt.' (Publication abstract)

'Tom O’Regan’s vision of cultural policy in the 1990s was original and durable because he emphasized the rhetorical politics and enunciative contexts of policy statements as well as their propositional contents. Reflecting on some of the changes that have occurred in Australia since that time, my commemoration of Tom’s work explores the role of the “corridor” metaphor in his thinking.' (Publication abstract)

'The widespread focus on policy moments in Australian cultural, academic and political debates is discussed, also describing the processes of policy formation. The narrowing gap between ‘unattached’ intellectuals and academics or cultural critics and ‘bureaucratic’ intellectuals in their participation in policy formation is considered unnecessary and ineffective.' (Publication abstract)

'This retrospective examines Tom O’Regan’s influence on South African cultural policy studies in light of the post-apartheid political transition, corruption and fallism. Implications for policy studies are discussed with regard to a recently liberated state that first, adopted Australian cultural policy precepts, and then closed them out 23 years later in response to the Rhodes Must Fall movement. Explanation is found not just in corruption and fallism, but in an inability to be outward-looking. The dialectical implications for policy studies are discussed.' (Publication abstract)

'This article reflects with affection on the work of the late Professor Tom O’Regan, in his interwoven capacities as scholar, teacher, colleague, friend, catalyst, and generous mentor to younger scholars. It attempts to convey the intellectual openness, curiosity, and conversations with others that shaped his research in Media and Cultural Studies, and to make visible the skeins of connective tissue across his many collaborations and projects. It traces the recent trajectories of his ideas from cultural discourse to policy, to audience measurement, to media platforms and algorithmic culture. It attends to his particular ability to see how seemingly disparate people, events, objects, and ideas related to each other, and to bring these elements into conversation with each other. Tom O’Regan’s desire to map interlocking systems of media, of technology, of institutions, of culture, was always geared towards an understanding of where points of intervention could best happen. I argue that his long-standing attachment to the writings of Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour did not just shape his research, but also his sense of his own role, responsibilities, and capacity to act in the service of others within the structures and networks of the contemporary Australian university.' (Publication abstract)

'This article explores the many parallels – but also discontinuities – between the interpersonal communication medium and research enterprise pursued by Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld in Personal Influence (1955) and the social media agenda and associated research enterprise of Facebook and Instagram. The essay begins with a discussion of ‘personal influence’ as the concept was first developed in the 1950s, outlining its historical context and initial limited application. It then shows how key ideas of Personal Influence can be seen as having been applied and embedded in the very fabric of social media itself. Yet Facebook represents a significant departure from both Katz and Lazarsfeld’s research agenda and from the market research and information regime of traditional media. Their audience research work of 1955 was avowedly public and transparent in its commitments. They were providing a market research product for advertising agencies, advertisers and media providers to re-purpose. In contrast, Facebook is private, proprietorial and opaque in its research provision. Facebook combines, under one roof, the roles of market research provider, media provider, and advertising agency. By prioritizing the collection and analysis of individual user profiles, Facebook has created a media enterprise that seamlessly integrates user-generated content, data collection, analysis, strategy, media provision and associated advertising machinery.' (Publication abstract)