Current projects

Automated feminisms

Claire Perkins, Maura Edmond, and Akane Kanai

Automated Feminisms is examining the way recommendation systems and algorithmically shaped sociality have come to intersect with highly visible and 'popular' forms of feminism. In what ways do the advanced filtering, sorting and recommendation systems of contemporary streaming and social media platforms shape contemporary feminist discourse and practice?  What new forms of feminised work, responsibility and care are being undertaken to negotiate these media contexts?

Woman and production cultures in transnational screen industries

Claire Perkins, Olivia Khoo and Lisa French

This project aims to address gender inequality as a persistent problem in screen production contexts across the world. The project expects to generate new knowledge on women’s experiences of the three transnational screen industries of Australia, the United States and South East Asia by moving beyond the primarily quantitative approaches currently used to measure women’s involvement. Expected outcomes of this project include the development of a new critical framework for understanding gender inequality in the screen industries and a practical toolkit of industry strategies for aspiring female practitioners. Both outcomes will provide significant benefit in combatting the gendered practices that limit women’s participation in this sector.

Gender and promotion: A history

Kate Fitch

The project offers a feminist cultural history of promotional work in Australia, investigating women’s public relations careers. The findings will offer an important historical context for understanding the feminisation of particular kinds of media work and the gendered stratification within media and promotional industries that continues today. They will also establish public relations as integral to communication and media industries and an important site for understanding feminised labour and media work.

Women and public relations in the Asia-Pacific

Kate Fitch

This working group, with scholars from Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia, emerged out of a research roundtable on gender and public relations at the APPRREN conference in Shah Alam, Malaysia in 2019. Work-in-progress includes a project on women and public relations leadership in the Southeast Asian region. The findings interrogate traditional, Western notions of leadership and its gendering and propose a research agenda to investigate more diverse, relational and context-specific approaches to the concept of public relations leadership.