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RMIT Classification: Trusted<br>
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Posted on behalf of Media@Sydney</div>
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<b>Media@Sydney presents a seminar by Professor Graeme Turner (UQ)</b>
<div><b>Facing the Public: On Writing the “The Shrinking Nation”</b></div>
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<div><span style="">2.30pm-4pm Friday 3 November, 2023</span></div>
<div><span style="">Seminar Room 203, RD Watt Building (AO4), University of Sydney</span></div>
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<div>Registration & further information at https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/facing-the-public-on-writing-the-shrinking-nation-tickets-729234769827</div>
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<div><span style=""><b>Abstract</b>: 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.</span></div>
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<div><span style="">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.</span><br>
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<div><span style=""><b>Bio</b>: 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).</span></div>
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<div> <span style="font-family: Aptos, Aptos_EmbeddedFont, Aptos_MSFontService, Calibri, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">For queries or more information, contact Mark R. Johnson (mark.r.johnson@sydney.edu.au), ‘Media@Sydney’ events
organizer, or Gerard Goggin (gerard.goggin@sydney.edu)</span></div>
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