[csaa-forum] Media at Sydney seminar by Prof Graeme Turner / Facing the Public: On Writing the “The Shrinking Nation”

[Rebecca Olive]

RMIT Classification: Trusted

Posted on behalf of Media at Sydney

Media at Sydney presents a seminar by Professor Graeme Turner (UQ)
Facing the Public: On Writing the “The Shrinking Nation”

2.30pm-4pm Friday 3 November, 2023
Seminar Room 203, RD Watt Building (AO4), University of Sydney

Registration & further information at https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/facing-the-public-on-writing-the-shrinking-nation-tickets-729234769827

Abstract: In his two most recent books, Graeme Turner has turned away from addressing a primarily academic audience in an attempt to take what cultural studies had taught him to a broader audience. The first of these was a small book for Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series on important record albums, dealing with John Farnham’s breakthrough album, Whispering Jack. The freedom Bloomsbury allowed its authors for this series offered an opportunity to write within a more relaxed discursive framework. The second was The Shrinking Nation, which began as a series of pieces on Australia’s diminished political culture before expanding into a broader socio-cultural analysis of the state of the nation. The objective was to take this analysis to the general reader but it took some time to attract a trade publisher, partly due to the writing habits of a lifetime. The process of turning these ideas into a book that would be persuasive for a general audience required significant changes to those habits, and to the expectations one might hold about what the general reader might want from the kind of knowledges we, as cultural studies scholars, have to offer. The publisher provided a non-fiction trade editor to guide Graeme through this transition, helping him understand how to go about writing serious critical work for a general public. That has proven an extremely interesting, even transformative, experience.

In this talk, Graeme will discuss the writing of this book, what he hoped to achieve through it, what was learnt from it, and how it seems to have turned out so far.

Bio: Graeme Turner AO is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. One of the founding figures in media and cultural studies in Australia, he is a former Federation Fellow, President of the Academy of the Humanities, and Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at UQ. He has published 30 books, and his work has been translated into a dozen languages. His most recent publications include The Shrinking Nation (UQP 2023), John Farnham’s Whispering Jack (Bloomsbury 2021), and Essays in Media and Cultural Studies: In Transition (Routledge 2020).

 For queries or more information, contact Mark R. Johnson (mark.r.johnson at sydney.edu.au), ‘Media at Sydney’ events organizer, or Gerard Goggin (gerard.goggin at sydney.edu)
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