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Identity and Cultural Transformations

The central theme of this research grouping is various forms of cultural transformation and the involvement of identity categories (such as race, gender, sexuality and class) within these transformations. Cultural transformation involves the changing meanings and practices of a social formation that take place both at the level of the individual and more widely across culture. Investigating the personal and collective experience of identity is a productive means of analysing these kinds of changes, as identity constitutes a crucial component in the organisation and functioning of culture. In analysing the relations of various identity categories to cultural transformations, we can see how these transformations are enacted, complicated, or resisted. The group is interested in issues of personal change, subjectivity, cultural attitudes and practices, political movements, and the roles of various forms of representation and documentation in relation to these issues. Within the group, there are four main strands of investigation around which various research activities are organised:
  • Genders and sexualities (explores current and historical understandings of these identity categories)
  • Media (analyses the deployment and cultural effects of various forms of media)
  • Minorities, nations, and migrancy (investigates the constitution of various national communities, the relations of minority populations to such communities, and the complication of ideas of nationhood offered by experiences of migrancy and diaspora)
  • Affect (explores mental and emotional states and their relations to culture, identity and subjectivity)

Although these strands constitute discrete units of investigation, their intersection is acknowledged, and the group is interested in specifying and analysing these connections in its activities.

Postgraduate research opportunities

The Faculty can offer supervision for a broad range of topics, but is keen to attract people working in some areas of strength or strategic development. (Some topics with Asian connections may cross into CAPSTRANS: please check its webpage.)
Media strand: contact: A/Prof Graham Barwell
  • national cinemas and cinema audiences
  • e-cultures
  • electronic editions/ history of the book
Gender and Sexualities: contact: Dr Guy Davidson
  • queer studies
  • masculinities
  • women's writing
  • women, modernity, technology
Nations, Diasporas and Minorities: contact: A/Prof Anne Collett
  • postcolonial literatures - including diaspora studies, the gothic, Canadian, Pacific, Caribbean, Indian writing, medievalism and the postcolonial
  • travel writing: medieval and contemporary, Spanish and anglophone
  • Australian society and cultures
  • micro-nationalisms and cultures in Europe
  • poetry and poetics
Other topics of interest: contact: A/Prof Paul Sharrad
  • affect theory and cultural expression
  • food cultures/ writing
  • Japanese children's literature
  • literature and environment/ ecology
  • Imaginings of conflict and peace
  • Intersections of visual arts and literature
The School Higher Degrees Coordinator Dr David Simpson can also give advice on procedural matters.
 
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University of Wollongong
Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia
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