Just thought I’d update with a couple of the things I’ve been working on over the (all too brief) Summer.
The first is a paper I was asked to do on the basis of the Rural and Regional Broadband workshop that was held in Wollongong in early 2009. My paper is essentially a case-study of a regional public sphere – in Townsville, North Queensland, that questions whether the decline of regional news media can be reversed with the “quick fix” of broadband investment.
The second is a paper I’ve been working on for awhile with Melissa Gregg from the University of Sydney on Australian true crime television drama, Underbelly. The television stuff is a bit of an additional interest for me alongside the stuff I usually do, but with this we hope we’ve put Underbelly in the broadest possible context, and we’[ve observed the way the series draws in so much – night time economies, codes of masculinity, urban geoigraphies and changing valuations of “ordinariness”.
I’ve reproduced them as fully readable and downloadable Scribd documents over the fold. I still have a couple of things I hope to knock off before teaching starts – keep you posted.