Cultural Transformations Research Network

About the Research

The Cultural Transformations Research Group is an interdisciplinary gathering of established and emerging scholars who explore the ways culture, broadly defined, changes and adapts to new locations, to interactions, to the availability of new media, and to other contextual changes. Within this framework members of the group examine, individually or in small groups, cultural products and art-works and their formation from a range of geographical and historical contexts and across a range of media including literature, film, television, theatre, music and new media.

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Coordinator Details

Name: Professor John Drummond
Department: Blair Professor, Department of Music and Associate Dean (Academic)
Telephone: 64 3 479 8880
john.drummond@stonebow.otago.ac.nz

Research Projects

• Mäori Television Project: a panel presentation on aspects of the new Mäori Television channel at the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia Conference, December 2004. This will be developed into a publication. (Dr Vijay Devadas and Dr Chris Prentice)
• Space in Computer Gaming (Dr Nicholls and Dr Ryan)
• Preparation of a refereed publication of lead papers from the first three International Transformations Symposia. Editorial Board: Dr Johnson, Dr Devadas, Dr Prentice. Expected completion date, mid 2005.
• Fourth International Transformations Symposium, December 2005. Topic to be agreed.
• We are looking at forming an ongoing link with the University of Technology, Sydney's Research Centre called "Trans/forming Cultures" and hope to hold compatible, parallel or joint symposia. There will be publications following on from these symposia.

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Previous Events

Culture(s) on the Edge

Cultural Transformations Network Annual Symposium

Thursday 29 November 2007
Burns 7 Lecture Theatre, Arts Building

An exciting line up of papers will be presented, ranging across the disciplines of literature, film, media, visual arts and music. The keynote speaker is Professor Jon Stratton of Curtin University.

Programme

• 9.30 Welcome: Professor John Drummond
• Keynote Speaker : Professor Jon Stratton, Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication and Cultural Studies, Curtin University of Technology - “Culture(s) On The Edge — a few thoughts”
• 10.30 Morning Coffee / Tea
• 11.00 – 12.30: Paper Session 1
• 11.00 Simon Ryan “The frame and the future: the programme of photography in the work of the Taranaki photographer W. A. Collis”.
• 11.30 Wendy Parkins “Why can't Hetty go home? George Eliot's Adam Bede and the Edge of Modernity”
• 12.00 John Drummond “Dunedin on the Edge”
• 1.00 – 1.30 LUNCH
• 1.30 - 3.00 Paper Session 2
• 1.30 Jo Smith "Maori Television within and against the Settler Nation"
• 2.00 Paola Voci “Animating China”
• 2.30 Marian Poole “Music at the Cross Roads: Art Music in New Zealand, 1957.”
• 3.00 Afternoon Coffee / Tea
• 3.30 - 4.30 Paper Session 3
• 3.30 Rochelle Simmons “Visual Culture and Marxist Art Criticism in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing”
• 4.00 Catherine Fowler “Taking it and Faking It : Performances of the Self in Recent Gallery Films”
• 4.30 Discussion and wrap-up

Download a copy of the programme and notes (PDF 208 KB)

Past Events

2005 Seminar Programme, Semester 2

All Seminars to be held in CASTLE C at 4pm

• Friday 19 August: 'Slow Living: An Ethics of Time?', Wendy Parkins (English)
• Monday 5 September: 'Earth, World, Planet': Where does the Postcolonial Literary Critic Stand?', Professor Diana Brydon (Univ. Western Ontario) Member of Research Team: Globalization and Autonomy
• Friday 23 September: To be confirmed
• Friday 7 October: 'Psyche, Time, Culture: Revising Psychoanalytic Film Theory', Susannah Radstone (Univ. of East London) Reader in School of Social Sciences, Cultural and Media Studies, visiting the University of Auckland Centre for Critical Inquiry

(Trans)figuring Bodies

4th International Symposium

Friday 2 to Sunday 4 December 2005
St Margaret's College, 333 Leith Street
University of Otago

Keynote speakers confirmed:

• Rob Cover (VUW)
• Jacqueline Lo (ANU)
• Catherine Waldby (UNSW)

The fourth annual symposium of the Cultural Transformations Research Network intends to give theorists and practitioners from across the Humanities the opportunity to consider how bodies are being represented and theorised, defined and inscribed; how embodiment is enacted and performed; in short, how bodies are (trans)figured.

For further information and a call for papers please download this pdf (104 KB)