Newsletter 6 June 2008

Annual Meeting 2008
ECR Membership Scheme
Node Proposals

Workshop a Great Success
Notices

Upcoming CRN Events

Annual Meeting 2008

Just a reminder to please let Angela know as soon as you are able whether you will be attending the Annual Meeting in Melbourne on 27-28 October, and also to let us know if your group would like to get together on the day before to have a node or project meeting.

ECR Membership Scheme

The call is now open for the final round of the ECR Membership Scheme. This is the second part of a double round in 2008, and will add up to 5 new ECR members. If you have anyone you would like to nominate into the Network, please have the nomination form to me by Friday 27th June. You can find a nomination form on the website, under “Forms”.

Remember, this is the final chance to add new members under the ECR Membership Scheme. General nominations for membership can still be made at any time, although anyone added from this year needs to already be working on a specific CRN project.

If you have any questions, or want to discuss proposed nominations before actually submitting them, please contact me.

Node Proposals

The next Management Committee meeting is scheduled for July, so now is the time to be thinking about proposals that you would like to put before the committee and talking to the convenor of the node that you think most closely fits your proposed project or activity. The node convenors are able to give guidance on putting proposals together and John/Lisa is also willing to help, especially if you are not sure which node might be the most appropriate one to approach in the first instance.

Workshop a Great Success

It’s great to be able to share the news with other participantsabout particularly successful events. We’ve asked Gay Hawkins if we could reproduce here her report on an extremely satisfying and productive workshop run by the NatureCultures group:

A recent CRN funded event that was a massive success was a writing workshop between the members of the CRN’sNatureCultures group (Gay Hawkins, Stephen Muecke, Emily Potter, Zoe Sofoulis) and a group of Melbourne Postgraduates thatwe met at the CSAA conference last year who ran a panel titled 'We have never been Latourians'.One of the people on this panel, Nate Tkacz, approached me afterwards to see if we'd like to get all the papers published. Stephen Muecke organised a special issue of AHR called nature/cultures/technologies coming out in Nov 2008. To get the papers up to scratch we all rewrote them for publication then read them all,then met for a day to discuss each paper closely to make the argument sing. It was sensational for the following reasons:

a) everyone had done their homework

b) none of us had ever had an experience of such close feedback and debate about our work and writing

c) the Melbourne postgraduates, Michael Dieter, Nate Tkacz, Janine Sanderson and Bjorn Nansen,were not at all intimidated; they really gave our papers a working over, as we did theirs!In other words no cringing deference, no hierarchy between postgrads andsenior academics,just this fabulous day of thinking and discussing and arguing over ideas and how to write them.

All up - great professional development for all involved, a lively little community of inquiry alive with great ideas and arguments.So THANKS to CRN for making that happen, it is really what should be happening much more often.

Notices

Congratulations to Stuart Cunningham and Kelly McWilliam, investigators on a successful ARC Linkage grant (funding commencing July 2008): Promoting youth wellbeing through participatory digital media: A multidisciplinary assessment of the mental health outcomes of cyberparticipation.

Congratulations also to Kay Anderson, whose book, Race and the Crisis of Humanism (2007), won the Gleebooks Prize for Critical Writing in the 2008 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

Some other new books from members that you might like to check out:

Shane Homan’s edited book (with Tony Mitchell), Sounds of Then, Sounds of Now: Popular Music in Australia, is being launched this Saturday 7 June. We hope that it goes well, Shane.

Jason Wilson’s edited book (with Melanie Swalwell), The Pleasures of Computer Gaming: Essays on Cultural History, Theory and Aesthetics, is now available from McFarland.

Stephen Muecke's has a new book, Joe in the Andamans and other Fictocritical Stories, published by Local Consumption Publications.

Upcoming Network Events

James Katz Speaking Tour, Cultural Technologies Node, Sydney and Brisbane, 4-6 June

Mobile Futures Workshop, Mobile Screens Working Group, Adelaide, 12-13 June

Media Histories Symposium, Media Histories & Cultural Technologies Nodes, Perth, 13-14 June

Japanese Transnational Fandoms and Female Consumers Workshop, Cultural Literacies Node, Wollongong, 3-4 July

ARC Cultural Research Network