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Student Research Profiles

There is wide range of research areas available in the School. Below is a list of students in the School and their research topics.

PhD Students

MA Research Students

PhD Abstracts

Michelle Bateman
PhD candidate
All In The Mind: Neurotheology and New Media Art

Spiritual themes and concerns have featured in the visual arts for centuries and across cultures, although they have fallen out of favour in more recent decades. My thesis is concerned with the ways in which scientific discourse may suggest new possibilities for the representation of spirituality in contemporary art. I focus on developments in the cognitive sciences and particularly the field of neurotheology, which is concerned with the relationship between the mind/brain and spiritual experiences. Neurotheology is having a dramatic impact on our understanding of spirituality, including its possible materialist aspects, as well as its social functions and expression through ritual, and I argue that it offers new ways for artists to engage with the spiritual, while also accounting for the scientific and social. Three examples of new media art are analysed with reference to aspects of neurotheological theory and it is argued that this art is itself spiritual, as well as representing spiritual themes. Finally, through their negotiations with neurotheology, these examples of new media art suggest new models for understanding spirituality that are capable of accommodating developments in cognitive sciences.

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Julie-Anne Long
PhD Candidate
Walking in Sydney/Looking for Dancing

The starting point for this research grew out of a concern shared by many in the performing arts that the small to medium dance sector in Australia has been in crisis for well over a decade. By tracing the history of contemporary dance in Sydney from the early 1980s through to the present day a picture emerges of how dance practice reflects the city and how they mutually inscribe one another. In Sydney, there is a broad range of contemporary dance practice. Government funded full-time companies and project-based work appears alongside independent artists who self produce, all often in spite of the odds. Over the past decade a gradual wearing down of artists, producers and administrators in the independent dance sector has occurred, diminishing the dance community on a personal and broader cultural level. I have interviewed a number of independent dancers and choreographers, who identify Sydney as their home base and who remain committed to continuing a dance practice under frequently complex and demanding conditions.

Using autoethnographic methods, this writing maps the city at my own historical point via the places and spaces where dancing occurs while remembering the sites where dancers used to work. The disappearance and loss of a number of places and spaces in the past two decades has forced a renegotiation of dance practice and this thesis explores the implications for the cultural form, the dancers and their community. Central to the theoretical framework of this thesis are the concepts and phenomena of space and place. I argue that the experience of place persists and remains an important consideration in sustaining a dance practice. Changes to Sydney's architecture and urban development, have been accompanied by a change, and indeed loss, in a sense of belonging within the dance community. Integral to this community is the dancing body and the inter-relationship between identity and belonging.

My research contributes to an understanding of how to observe and write about dance practice, and offers a timely examination of the troubled status and dynamics of dance in Sydney and its implications for the future.

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Sovini Tan
PhD Candidate

Women's genres have generally been denigrated and perceived as inherently conservative and reactionary. This view is predominant within feminist film theory, which often focuses on the negative portrayals of women in films. Contemporary film theories, having their origin within literary studies, have prioritized texts over contexts. As a result, feminist film critics have favored psychoanalytic and textual models of spectatorship, centered on female subjectivity, sexual differences and unconscious desires. It is problematic because these theories only address unconscious desires and pleasures and totally dismiss the real viewer in the auditorium. As a result, the cinematic audiences and their experiences still remain at large unexplored.

On the other hand, there is a flourishing body of work on women's popular genres in cultural studies, especially within television, investigating female audience activities, their role as cultural consumers, and the pleasures they derive from these fictions utilizing ethnography. As a result, following Stacey's lead (1994), my goal is to relocate female cinematic spectatorship in the social context in order to depict a more complex picture and hence reclaim a form of agency for the female spectator by bringing cultural studies' methodology and work to feminist film theory. In particular, my research project explores the role of contemporary romantic comedies in women's everyday lives, and focuses on the factors that promote and maintain the popularity of this genre among female audiences. In doing so, I will inevitably discuss the dangers, dilemmas and debates surrounding women's popular culture and feminist works.

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Rayma Watkinson
PhD candidate
Almost No Boundaries: The Film-Work of Jean Rouch

At the time of his death in 2004, the French ethnographer and filmmaker, Jean Rouch had made more than one hundred and twenty films spanning over nearly six decades. Most of Rouch's films followed a specific ethnographic path that recorded and documented existing pre-colonial West African rituals. This thesis concentrates on a relatively short period during the 1950s and focuses on a number of films that specifically dealt with crossing colonial boundaries as well as questioning the place of performance in such cross-cultural and political journeys. These are works that need more attention and analysis in terms of dealing with both African colonial and post-colonial contexts and questions of representation than have been received to date. This research will contribute to an understanding of the role of performance and film within specific colonial, cultural and political contexts, and further, consider the nature of identity and the place of the imagination within such realms. This study will also contribute to underlining the significance and legacy of the film work of Jean Rouch.

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MA Research Abstracts

Lynne Broad
MA Research
The Poetics of Editing in Chris Marker's Sunless

This thesis is about the poetics of editing in Chris Marker's documentary, Sunless, (1982) generally considered to be his masterpiece. Catherine Lupton, for instance, states that the film synthesises and transcends its component obsessions into 'a virtuoso meditation on time, place, memory, history and representation.' (1) Lupton contends that in Sunless, as in all his films, Marker uses the filmed evidence of the physical world to map a subjective consciousness (2). In Sunless, this subjective consciousness is expressed in essay form, interwoven with a displaced (and possibly fictional self-portrait), and an explication on representation. The manner of the film's discussion is typical of Marker, combining poetry, humour and Metaphysical wit. The focus of this thesis is the poetics of editing in Sunless: the specific ways Marker organises his presentation of images, sounds, and other cinematic phenomena, along with their freight of narrative content - indexical, emotional, sensual, cognitive in order to 'map a subjective consciousness'.

This thesis will frame its poetics of the editing in Sunless by defining editing as a craft, and as such, part of a century-long tradition of cinematic practice. (Much other theoretical work has considered Marker's filmwork within the context of film theory but separate from the context of the craft theory and influences from which the work itself arose.) Although much has been written about Sunless itself, no previous work has discussed its editing in terms of its basis as a craft. A detailed examination of specific editing techniques in Sunless, set in a historical context, will enable the thesis to reveal the origins of these techniques in the theory and practice of earlier filmmakers, (particularly the Soviet and European filmmakers of the silent film era, such as Vertov and Murnau) as well as the contribution made by Marker's editing techniques to developments in cinematic and other visual media in the latter part of the 20th century. In the process the thesis will explore the way Marker has extended and developed the genre of compilation filmmaking pioneered by Esfir Shub and Vertov in such a way as to contribute to the late- 20th-century development of 'interactive' media, (where narrative structure gives way to the systematics of process, with concomitant change in the experience of individual viewing).

(1) Lupton, Catherine, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, Reaktion Books Ltd, London, 2005, p9.
(2) Lupton... p