Publications

Screen and Sound Cultures researchers publish for both scholarly and general audiences. Here is a snapshot of some of our recent work.

Material making-making in the digital age book cover

Material Media-Making in the Digital Age by Daniel Binns

Intellect Books

https://www.intellectbooks.com/material-media-making-in-the-digital-age

A journey through a variety of tools and technologies from vlogging to drone cinematography to considerations of time, editing, and sound design, Material Media-Making in the Digital Age offers professionals, scholars, and students alike the chance to re-think how they engage with new media technology, about media and its place in the world.

The Female Gaze in Documentary Film book cover

The Female Gaze in Documentary Film by Lisa French

Palgrave

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-68094-7

The Female Gaze in Documentary Film is an international perspective that makes a timely contribution to the recent rise in interest in the status, presence, achievements and issues for women in contemporary screen industries. It examines the works, contributions and participation of female documentary directors globally. The central preoccupation of the book is to consider what might constitute a 'female gaze', an inquiry that has had a long history in filmmaking, film theory and women's art. It fills a gap in the literature which to date has not substantially examined the work of female documentary directors. Moreover, research on sex, gender and the gaze has infrequently been the subject of scholarship on documentary film, particularly in comparison to narrative film or television drama. A distinctive feature of the book is that it is based on interviews with significant female documentarians from Europe, Asia and North America.

Giallo! Genre, modernity, and detection in italian horror cinema book cover

Giallo!: Genre, Modernity, and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema by Alexia Kannas

SUNY Press

https://www.sunypress.edu/p-6907-giallo.aspx

Traces the giallo mystery/horror genre from its genesis in Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s to its contemporary place in the global cult-film canon.

Italian giallo films have a peculiar allure. Taking their name from the Italian for “yellow”— reflecting the covers of pulp crime novels—these genre movies were principally produced between 1960 and the late 1970s. These cinematic hybrids of crime, horror, and detection are characterized by elaborate set-piece murders, lurid aesthetics, and experimental soundtracks. Using critical frameworks drawn from genre theory, reception studies, and cultural studies, Giallo! traces this historically marginalized genre’s journey from Italian cinemas to the global cult-film canon. Through close textual analysis of films including The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), and The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), Alexia Kannas considers the rendering of urban space in the giallo and how it expresses a complex and unsettling critique of late modernity.

Ambient play book cover

Ambient Play by Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson

MIT Press

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/ambient-play

How mobile games are part of our day-to-day lives and the ways we interact across digital, material, and social landscapes. We often play games on our mobile devices when we have some time to kill—waiting in line, pausing between tasks, stuck on a bus. We play in solitude or in company, alone in a bedroom or with others in the family room. In Ambient Play, Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson examine how mobile gameplay fits into our day-to-day lives. They show that as mobile games spread across different genres, platforms, practices, and contexts, they become an important way of experiencing and navigating a digitally saturated world. Mobile games become conduits for what the authors call ambient play, pervading much of our social and communicative terrain. We become digital wayfarers, moving constantly among digital, material, and social worlds.

The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development book cover

The Palgrave Handbook of Script Development edited by Craig Batty & Stayci Taylor

Palgrave

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-82234-7

With original and engaging contributions, this Handbook confirms feminist scholarship in development studies as a vibrant research field. It reveals the diverse ways that feminist theory and practice inform and shape gender analysis and development policies, bridging together generations of feminists from different institutions, disciplines and regions

Understanding games and game cultures book cover

Understanding Games and Game Cultures by Ingrid Richardson, Larissa Hjorth, Hugh Davies

SAGE Publishing

https://au.sagepub.com/en-gb/oce/understanding-games-and-game-cultures/book265645

Digital games are one of the most significant media interfaces of contemporary life. Games today interweave with the social, economic, material, and political complexities of living in a digital age. But who makes games, who plays them, and what, how and where do we play? In this book Richardson, Hjorth and Davies explore the ways in which games and global game cultures can be understood. They investigate the sites, genres, platforms, interfaces and contexts for games and gameplay, offering a critical overview of the breadth of contemporary game studies.

Script development book cover

Script Development: Critical Approaches, Creative Practices, International Perspectives edited by Craig Batty & Stayci Taylor

Palgrave

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030487126

This book offers the first international look at how script development is theorised and practiced. Drawing on interviews, case studies, discourse analysis, creative practices and industry experiences, it brings together scholars and practitioners from around the world to offer critical insights into this core, but often hidden, aspect of screenwriting and screen production. Chapters speculate and reflect upon how creative, commercial and social practices – in which ideas, emotions, people and personalities combine, cohere and clash – are shaped by the practicalities, policies and rapid movements of the screen industry. Comprising two parts, the book first looks ‘into’ script development from a theoretical perspective, and second looks ‘out from’ the practice to form practitioner-led perspectives of script development. With a rising interest in screenwriting and production studies, and an increased appetite for practice-based research, the book offers a timely mapping of the terrain of script development, providing rich foundations for both study and practice.

Creating with mobile media book cover

Creating with Mobile Media by Marsha Berry

Palgrave

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319653150

This book investigates the convergence between locative, mobile and social media in order to show how people use mobile media for their creative practice—creative writing, photography, video and filmmaking. The central thematic focus of this book explores how mobile media has created new opportunities and contexts for creative practitioners. It draws together creative practice research with non-representational theory and digital ethnography to provide a fresh perspective on the place mobile media has in our everyday creative lives. Fictionalized and semi-fictional vignettes are used to present empirical material taken from fieldnotes and interviews to demonstrate how new forms and genres of art making have arisen because of the affordances of mobile media. The chapters in this volume have been arranged into a sequence according to the kinds of actions that make up various creative practices.

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Netflix Nations: The Geography of Digital Distribution by Ramon Lobato

NYU Press

https://nyupress.org/9781479804948/netflix-nations/

How streaming services and internet distribution have transformed global television culture. Netflix Nations addresses a fundamental tension in the digital media landscape – the clash between the internet’s capacity for global distribution and the territorial nature of media trade, taste, and regulation. The book also explores the failures and frictions of video-on-demand as experienced by audiences. The actual experience of using video platforms is full of subtle reminders of market boundaries and exclusions: platforms are geo-blocked for out-of-region users (“this video is not available in your region”); catalogs shrink and expand from country to country; prices appear in different currencies; and subtitles and captions are not available in local languages. These conditions offer rich insight for understanding the actual geographies of digital media distribution. Contrary to popular belief, the story of Netflix is not just an American one. From Argentina to Australia, Netflix’s ascension from a Silicon Valley start-up to an international television service has transformed media consumption on a global scale. Netflix Nations will help readers make sense of a complex, ever-shifting streaming media environment.

To boldly go book cover

To Boldly Go: Marketing the Myth of Star Trek by Djoymi Baker

Bloomsbury Publishing

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/to-boldly-go-9781838609733/

Today's media, cinema and TV screens are host to new manifestations of myth, their modes of storytelling radically transformed from those of ancient Greece. They present us with narratives of contemporary customs and belief systems: our modern-day myths. This book argues that the tools of transmedia merchandising and promotional material shape viewers' experiences of the hit television series Star Trek, to reinforce the mythology of the gargantuan franchise. Media marketing utilises the show's method of recycling the narratives of classical heritage, yet it also looks forward to the future. In this way, it reminds consumers of the Star Trek story's ongoing centrality within popular culture, whether in the form of the original 1960s series, the later additions such as Voyager and Discovery or J. J. Abrams' `reboot' films. Chapters examine how oral and literary traditions have influenced the series structure and its commercial image, how the cosmological role of humanity and the Earth are explored in title sequences across various Star Trek media platforms, and the multi-faceted way in which Internet, video game and event spin-offs create rituals to consolidate the space opera's fan base. Fusing key theory from film, TV, media and folklore studies, as well as anthropology and other specialisms, To Boldly Go is an authoritative guide to the function of myth across the whole Star Trek enterprise.

aboriginal flag
torres strait flag

Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business - Artwork 'Luwaytini' by Mark Cleaver, Palawa.

aboriginal flag
torres strait flag

Acknowledgement of Country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.