Liz Bullen - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Liz Bullen

Marvels and Tales, 2017

Fairy tales are perennially criticized for their cruelty, deceit, violence, and perversions of se... more Fairy tales are perennially criticized for their cruelty, deceit, violence, and perversions of sex and power. Because these are also habitual preoccupations of crime stories, it is not surprising that hybrid fairy-tale detective narratives are among current remediations of fairy tales. We focus on the Australian children’s animated television series The Fairy Tale Police Department (Yoram Gross–EM.TV 2001). Drawing on theories of genre and intermediality, we examine how the hybrid features of the series, including the pleasures and politics of its doubled generic and media codes, succeed and fail as strategies to promote the values of cultural democracy.

Knowledge economy policies typically seek to harness higher education to economic outcomes. Tensi... more Knowledge economy policies typically seek to harness higher education to economic outcomes. Tensions between the arts and humanities and the commercial imperatives of the knowledge economy are growing. This book explores how these tensions are played out within international and national higher education policies, within university arts and humanities departments and within the process of writing itself. Essays in this collection investigate the impact of the knowledge economy phenomenon on the arts and humanities and suggest both practical and creative ways of responding to this global policy environment. This book is relevant to scholars who are rethinking the theory and practice of the arts and humanities within the context of globalization, information technology and entrepreneurship. It will interest students and academics whose courses engage with notions of « the commodity, « knowledge, and « creativity within the fields of cultural and media studies, education and sociology....

Childhood: critical concepts in sociology, 2005

... Through a range of'image clusters'(Hebdige 1988: 30), youth was con-structe... more ... Through a range of'image clusters'(Hebdige 1988: 30), youth was con-structed as a spectacle consisting of contradictory elements. It was understood as fun and trouble, compliant in peer terms but resistant in generational terms. ...

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, 2019

$Research paper thumbnail of Children\u27s literature and the affective turn: Affect, emotion, empathy$

… , humanities, and the knowledge …, 2004

... Further, they are to develop curriculum suitable to constructing glo-bally inflected entrepre... more ... Further, they are to develop curriculum suitable to constructing glo-bally inflected entrepreneurial subjects. ... (1999a). Managing national innovation systems. ... Elizabeth Bullen is a Research Fellow in the School of Education, Monash University, Victoria, Australia. She has a Ph. ...

Bookbird: A Journal of International Children's Literature, 2016

Contents: Introduction: youth, mobility, and identity / Nadine Dolby and Fazal Rizvi -- New times... more Contents: Introduction: youth, mobility, and identity / Nadine Dolby and Fazal Rizvi -- New times, new identities -- The global corporate curriculum and the young cyberfleneur as global citizen / Jane Kenway and Elizabeth Bullen -- Shoot the elephant: antagonistic identities, neo-marxist nostalgia, and the remorselessly vanishing past / Cameron McCarthy and Jennifer Logue -- New textual worlds: young people and computer games / Catherine Beavis -- Diasporic youth: rethinking borders and boundaries in the new modernity -- Consuming difference: stylish hybridity, diasporic identity, and the politics of culture / Michael Giardina -- Diasporan moves: African Canadian youth and identity formation / Jennifer Kelly -- Popular culture and recognition: narratives of youth and Latinidad / Angharad Valdivia -- Mobile students in liquid modernity: negotiating the politics of transnational identities / Parlo Singh and Catherine Doherty -- Youth and the global context: transforming us where we li...

Ordinary Lifestyles Popular Media Consumption and Taste, 2005

The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture

In discussing contemporary construcutions of the young in the so called developed countries of th... more In discussing contemporary construcutions of the young in the so called developed countries of the West, this paper draws particularly from theories of cultural globalisation. It outlines and compares two competing but intersecting constructions of childhood. The paper compares the competing resources for youthful identity building offered by the corporate curriculum of consumer-media culture and that of schooling in corporatised education systems. It focuses particularly on questions of generation, pleasure and agency. In so doing it will explain the difficulties education policy faces in gaining the consent of the young in the age of desire and will point to the need for policy to help teachers to enchant the classroom. It will then identify several lessons that education policy makers might learn from their those who develop the 'corporate curriculum'. At the same time it will explain the paradoxes for policies that arise should such lessons be learnt. The paper draws f...

Theory and Research in Education, 2005

It is a contention of the culturalist strand of underclass theory that the growth of the undercla... more It is a contention of the culturalist strand of underclass theory that the growth of the underclass is not a function of social and economic change, but of features intrinsic to underclass culture. Children born into disadvantaged communities, it is argued, are socialized into the ‘deviant’ culture of their families, families typically headed by single mothers. According to the underclass thesis, daughters of such families will face a heightened risk of leaving school early and teenage pregnancy. An unanticipated correlation between claims of the underclass thesis and the cohort of mothers and daughters with whom we are working on a current project has led us to ask, ‘how do we acknowledge the culture of disadvantaged communities and their generational synergies, whilst avoiding the pernicious implications of the underclass thesis?’ To answer this question, this article assesses the merits of bringing Bourdieu’s ideas on cultural capital together with Sarah Thornton’s concept of sub...

Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 2000

The Looking Glass: New Perspectives on Children's …, 2007

She is currently a co-researcher on a research project on representations of social class in rece... more She is currently a co-researcher on a research project on representations of social class in recent children's literature and the implications for citizenship. In the first season of the Fox television series, The OC (2003-2004), a teenager from the wrong side of the tracks finds himself in wealthy Newport Beach, Orange County-the OC of the title. Rescued from an implied future of juvenile delinquency, 16-year-old Ryan Atwood is at first perceived to be a threat to this world of luxury, ostentation and conspicuous consumption. Over the course of the season, Ryan is able to win the heart of rich girl-next-door, the troubled Marissa Cooper, and, it seems, transcend his class origins. According to Tim Goodman, the plotline of creator Josh Schwartz's series distinguishes it from earlier teen dramas like Beverley Hills 90210 and Dawson's Creek and avoids the clichés of the genre. In many respects, however, Ryan is living another cliché, the American Dream, his social ascendency suggesting that success is possible regardless of one's start in life. In fact, this ideology disguises the reality of social inequality and the way in which it militates against equal opportunity. As media scholar, Linda Holtzman, explains, the pervasiveness of the American Dream leads some Americans to believe that the United States is a "classless society" (99). However, social mobility is implicit in the American Dream since it is very much about leaving one class location for another, more desirable, station in life. From this point of view, the way in which The OC portrays those who can and cannot ascend in the class hierarchy, and the resources that aid or assist them in their progress, is worthy of investigation. Indeed, it is worthy of investigation for reasons beyond the merits or not of this particular television series. Who is Ryan Atwood? Social Mobility and the Class Chameleon in Th...

British Educational Research Journal, 2003

This is an important book in a number of ways, primarily because it draws attention to changes wh... more This is an important book in a number of ways, primarily because it draws attention to changes which are affecting education and childhood in profound ways; changes which are almost totally ignored in UK research work on education reform. That is, most research and comment on educational reform and change in the UK systematically neglects the ways in which educational experiences and the experience of childhood are increasingly colonised, influenced and reworked through the images, desires, mechanisms and relationships-the pleasures and power-of the entertainment and advertising industries. The interpenetration of state and private, education and business, professionalism and profit are obscured by the narrow focus of much school-based research. As Kenway and Bullen put it, the failure to engage with 'today's young people in the terms or on the grounds upon which they grow and seek to become somebody … is a form of denial' (p. 3). The book draws upon three theoretically informed, empirically based research projects conducted between 1990 and 2000. The first was a documentary and policy analysis of the market phenomenon in education. The second involved the development of an archive of all the educational formations that came together at the nexus of markets, education and information and communications technologies (ICTs)-including television-, in Australia, the USA, UK and Canada. The final project sought a kid's-eye view of these processes and relationships and involved interviews and observation in and around seven schools in Geelong, Victoria, with boys and girls of various ages and different social classes: 'of central concern was how students' educational consumption connected with their other consumption patterns, their identities and their relationships' (p. 6). The projects and the book draw upon a highly diverse international literature from a range of fields. The book offers what the authors call 'an eagle's eye view of consumer kids/consuming culture'. Both substantively and theoretically it brings together things that 'often stand apart'. The book works both as a primer for those readers wanting to access the literatures on consumption in the 'age of desire' and begins to document and interpret the 'big cultural shifts' which are reworking childhood and the school student. The book is full of examples and illustrations of the collapsing demarcations between education, entertainment and advertising, both from the archives and from the research with students, and it is difficult to convey any sense of the vibrancy and sheer number of these in a short review. Even the most casual visitor to a UK school would find it difficult not to notice the increasing presence of 'well-known' commercial names on the books, walls, materials etc. that children use and through which they move and learn. Schools are increasingly a market opportunity to business, both directly as sources of revenue for services or management, and indirectly, as a way of accessing the lucrative child market, and Kenway and Bullen suggest that 'as mainstream advertising strategy becomes more commonplace in schools, child and youth consumers will become less astute in their understanding of the position consumer culture asks them to occupy' (p. 120). Chapter 1 provides the historical and theoretical backdrop to the book and focuses on key moments in the history of consumer-media culture and outlines different theoretical approaches to the understanding of this culture. Chapter 2 considers the invention of the young consumer within the construction of contemporary childhood. Chapter 3 considers kids' culture, the generation gap and the 'othering' of adults. Chapter 4 reviews some of the ever more creative tactics of 'promiscuous corporations' eager to