Museums play a vital role in presenting the past in a logical way. In relation to the Holocaust, the role of the Museum has shifted to accommodate for a traumatic and incomprehensible past that cannot be so easily understood. Thus, in some cases, Museums are becoming less about facts. Spaces such as these have been redefined as a place of reverence and remembrance where one can understand a traumatic event through medias such as artwork and testimony alongside standard forms of remembering the past. At the same time, these places cope with the challenge of the decline of living survivors; something that questions the way Holocaust memory will be treated once living memory ceases to exist. Inspired by my recent volunteer employment at the Jewish Museum of Australia (JMA), this essay will discuss how Jewish Culture and the Holocaust are represented and made sense of in Melbourne using the Museum space as a media. I will consider how the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Elsternwick provides a powerful space for remembrance through various methods of remembering and how the JMA works to create tolerance and understanding of Jewish Culture in Australia. I will explain why these two spaces stand alone and not together.

Since the advent of postmodernism, the increased emphasis on conceptual, nonrepresentational and dematerialized modes of practice, within the realm of the visual arts, has radically altered notions of what constitutes art and artistic skill. This ethos has permeated tertiary institutions and impacted upon the educational foundation provided to students, many of whom graduate without attaining a sound grounding in traditional artistic disciplines such as drawing, painting and sculpture. This ‘deskilling’ of artists in a traditional sense, may be regarded as placing detrimental limitations on the capacity of artists to manifest the cerebral within a corporeal realm and communicate in a sophisticated, nuanced and effective manner. Many contend it de-historicizes artistic practice by disregarding the fact that skills are not merely manual dexterity but forms of knowledge whose acquisition implies access to a body of accumulated wisdom.

However a broader, more intellectualized, pluralistic conception of the visual arts is also ardently championed. It is considered by some to be a welcome, refreshing revision of narrow and archaic academic approaches. By facilitating the development of unique artistic lexicons, dialogues and skillsets, it has perhaps allowed art to maintain its relevance within a contemporary context. Innovations have encompassed diverse avenues such as video, performance, installation and 3-D printing. It is debateable whether the recession of established historical paradigms is a loss which should be remedied or merely part of an inevitable artistic evolution. I will seek to investigate the divergent perspectives regarding this issue and contemplate the trajectory which is being embarked upon. I will also explore the ramifications for young creatives, their audiences and society as a whole.

The study will examine how the stability and duration of party systems in Sub-Saharan Africa, their structure and composition, as well as constitutional constraints and empowerments on parties and legislatures influence the functional development of democratic features and their consolidations. A particular focus of the study will lie on the question under what circumstances (and why) a multi-party system provides a de facto institutionalisation of neopatrimonialism rather than being a vital safeguard of pluralistic competition of interests. Independent variables include ethnic homogeneity, colonial history and economic development. The study employs a macropolitical comparative design, analysing the aforementioned variables across three Sub-Saharan countries through a Most Similar Systems Design.

(the abstract will be extended with further methodology and a summary of the findings, as research progresses over summer)

"Public Diplomacy” has lately attracted considerable attention in foreign policy. It is a mean of attract other country’s attention through policy, public information, and culture to obtain diplomatic result what they want. Today Korea, which is surrounded by big powers such as Japan and China, is putting a great deal of effort into Public Diplomacy as a mean of making network with other countries and sending charm of Korea effectively. Especially it may be said that exportation of content industry, such as “ Han-ryu” (Korean wave) is a successful example, because international image against Korea has improved. And the campaign of comfort women problem in the United States is also a kind of Public Diplomacy at a point to call the public opinion of the target country. But to improve the political conflict between Japan and Korea, cultural exchange plays important role. In this study, I research the relation of foreign policy and culture. Then, define Public Diplomacy and analyse the case of Korea, and consider its effect to suggest the way of making good partnership between Japan and Korea.

Partly undertaken with a grant from the URSS, the research examines and compares the differing grievances underlying two long-running insurgent movements in the Philippines: that of the nationwide Maoist insurgency headed by the New People's Army, and the Moro-based independence movement in the south of the country, led once by the Moro National Liberation Front, then by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. It considers the similarities and differences in their emergence, both in the early 70s, finding that whilst the tactics, military organisation, rhetoric and claims to legitimacy differ between the two insurgencies, the underlying causes of the armed conflict possess striking parallels: repression by the central Philippine state, underdevelopment, and lack of land reform. The ability of the insurgents to sustain their rebellions stems from articulating clear (if fundamentally different) explanations and ideological frameworks for the problems facing the peasant class, and developing military strategies able to resist government counterinsurgency plans, most recently President Arroyo’s Oplan Bantay Laya and President Aquino’s Oplan Bayanihan. The research included 6 weeks of field work in the Philippines and 6 weeks of academic research in the UK. The bulk of URSS research analysed secondary source material from scholars in the Philippines and Western world, data collected and arguments deployed by campaign groups on the ground in Mindanao, and the literature put out by the insurgent groups (the MNLF and then MILF, and the NPA). The NPA’s role as the armed wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines resulted in a wealth of source material for understanding the NPA’s grievances and military strategy, since the Party’s analysis stems from the writings of a former University of the Philippines Professor and re-founder of the CPP, Jose Maria Sison.'

This research examines the proliferation and popularity of third-wave cafes in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where over a hundred have opened within the last five years. Drawing on qualitative data gathered from 20 semi-structured interviews as well as ethnographic observation, it shows how third-wave cafés have successfully emerged as differentiated spaces from other urban coffeehouses (such as traditional kopitiams and Starbucks outlets) in the consumer imagination. It suggests that this establishment of spatial distinction follows directly from the ways in which these cafés structure opportunities for the consumption of difference among patrons. Third-wave cafes in Kuala Lumpur facilitate the consumption of difference in two inter-related ways: (1) in the form of a particular experience of novelty and exclusivity as structured by the cafe space, and (2) through their perceived variance from other coffeehouses, existing outside the imagined spatial perimeters of local kopitiams and Starbucks outlets. This work demonstrates how these unite to construct a highly specific consumer experience, inflected with wider power politics relating to a perceived East-West binary, and the growing inclination toward alternative consumption practices among young Malaysian urbanites. This research carries implications for contemporary sociological understandings of coffeehouses as ‘third places’ in urban consumer contexts, as the cafés observed deviate strongly from traditional conceptualizations of "third places", and thus problematize fundamental assumptions about the nature of these informal social gathering sites. They are as such ideal conduits through which to study some of the new dynamics of difference operating in Southeast Asian public consumption spaces.

The substantial growth in the service sector has resulted in a growing significance of aesthetic and emotional labour in the workplace and recruitment process, increasing pressures for workers to ‘look good’ and ‘sound right’. This brings growing concerns that aesthetic and emotional labour are problematic, especially for those who do not conform to ideas of whiteness, heteronormativity or femininity and masculinity. Therefore, it is fundamental to begin to examine the production of power and how it is reflected through labour. This piece will go beyond existing literature to explore the plights of black women in shot girl work, which is lacking in assessment. Shot girl work is a fascinating yet unanalysed form of labour fitting into the broader night-time economy, of bars and clubs. Shot girls, dress, interact and work in a way no other staff in a nightclub are required to. These increasing pressures need to be assessed through locating power, and examining whether this type of labour is discriminatory.

Furthermore, Black women are victim to greater systems of oppression affecting how they are perceived, treated and their access to work, which will be analysed in the wider context of aesthetic and emotional labour, to begin tackling these issues.

Utilising the methods of a participant observation and content analysis of a range of shot girl recruitment companies, this work will examine the experiences of shot girls from recruitment to work, in order to assess power, inequality, the ‘look’ and position of black women in aesthetic and emotional labour.

Abstract - The definition of Cartoons has long been entrenched in a variety of subtexts. From being seen as a still illustration to even a 3D animation seen on film, the definition or the language of Cartoons has long been lost in finding a definite. In this paper, we proposed to define this indefinite by proposing that ""Cartoons"" have two components that define it: It's visual style and particularly it's motion style. Additionally, this paper will look into the potential and adaptation of this language of Cartoons in the evolving 3D media both across films and video games.

Keywords: cartoons, animation, 3-dimensional technology, language of cartoons, motion style, visual style

Over the past decade, Ai Weiwei has emerged one of China's most famous contemporary artists cum political activist in the Western world. His works have been exhibited in over 50 solo and group exhibitions organised by museums and galleries in the West. What appears to be interesting in this phenomenon is that although Ai Weiwei's works of art are largely a response to politically contingent issues to Chinese society, they have continued to appeal to Western audiences. As much as significant research has been done on Ai Weiwei's works as well as the History of exhibitions, insufficient research has been done with regards to audience research. In other words, there is generally a lack of a framework to study Western audiences that visit his exhibitions. This paper will investigate how exhibitions of Ai's work in the UK have successfully attracted and encouraged the attendance and participation of new audiences in Contemporary Chinese art. Besides engaging audiences through various mediums such as information panels and guided tours, participation is gauged by the extent of which the audience is able to invent their own translations of what they see in an exhibition rather than being confined to what the curator or artist intended to communicate through the exhibition. Through archival research, interviews with curators and also site visits, a new framework will be devised to determine the extent of success of these exhibitions. This paper will aim to supplement current scholarship in relation to the History of exhibitions and curatorial studies.

By systematically analysing the literary sources for references and descriptions of disability in all its forms, I will provide a useful insight into how disability was conceptualised, realised and integrated within wider ancient Greek culture, giving voice to the large disabled populace of Greece, something which has never been fully realised before. In order to accomplish this I will be analysing the works of the three literary giants of the Greek world: Homer, Herodotus and Hippocrates. Through the accounts of these influential authors I will show how the everyday populace of ancient Greece coped with a myriad of disabilities that we still face today. From clubfoot, lameness and blindness to baldness, lice and infertility, the literary corpus of ancient Greece holds within its pages a wealth of knowledge on disability which is waiting to be interpreted. With recent publications by Robert Garland and Martha Rose forming the only real dedicated basis on the topic, my research will therefore be at the forefront in understanding disability within my discipline.