Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: In developing his "cultural approach to communication," James Carey turned to intellectual history to illustrate what he called "the fundamental divide among communications scholars." He was, in the 1970s, an insurgent, fighting to break the monopoly held by the field’s long-dominant behavioral science approach. What he did was to narrate an alternative history centered on Charles Horton Cooley, John Dewey and the Chicago School of sociology--identified by Carey as a rich tradition of thinking about communication that was, however, swept aside by the emerging "effects" tradition in the late 1930s and quickly obliterated from the field’s memory. Carey had recast that "fundamental divide" in historical terms, with his particular version of the Chicago School asked to stand in for interpretive communication research. Dewey, Cooley and Park furnished Carey with an eminently usable past, displaced and recoverable—"buried treasure," to borrow Kurt Danziger’s term.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: I re-examine the historical emergence of pragmatism and I suggest James Carey was unable to challenge positivism or objectivism from within a pragmatist tradition. I then retrieve John Dewey’s account of inquiry and I re-situate the Dewey-Lippmann debate within the context of a pragmatist tradition to demonstrate how deeply their differences turn on problem formulation. In conclusion, I connect the pragmatist tradition to contemporary work on problematization to address the limitations of each perspective.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: In my paper, I examine the representation of U.S. influence on Australian culture within fiction by Peter Carey that is set in Australia, specifically the short story “American Dreams” (1974) and Carey’s first two novels, Bliss (1981) and Illywhacker (1985). Carey moved to the United States in 1989; however, in his fiction, he explored U.S. cultural influence within Australia for many years prior to his expatriation. Carey was born in 1943, and thus his childhood, adolescence and adulthood coincided with the escalation of U.S. influence on Australian culture, foreign policy and trade that took place after the Second World War, when the U.S. replaced Britain as Australia’s military protector and dominant cultural influence.
Carey’s fiction engages with American cultural influence in Australia during the early twentieth century (Illywhacker), the middle twentieth century (“American Dreams” and Illywhacker), and the late twentieth century (Bliss and Illywhacker). The allegorical short story “American Dreams” concerns the citizens of an Australian town who become obsessed with dreams of American movie stars, cars and televisions to such an extent that they fail to appreciate their own lives and environment. In a surreal twist, the town becomes an international tourist attraction frequented by Americans, forcing the citizens to confront the realities of American cultural and economic influence and to recognize their failure to appreciate Australian culture. Carey’s first novel, Bliss, explores U.S. cultural influence on both the micro and macro levels, incorporating an American businessman who is the business partner of the protagonist, Harry Joy, and has an affair with Harry’s wife, and a large American oil company whose business practices cause cancer clusters. The U.S. cultural influence in Bliss is presented as pervasive, all-powerful, seductive, and highly destructive.
The action of Illywhacker begins in 1885, before the creation of the Australian nation, when the continent was occupied by a group of British colonies, and continues until 2025. The time-span of the novel allows Carey to explore the period of British dominance and its subsequent demise, as well as chart the rise of U.S. cultural influence. The narrator and protagonist, Herbert Badgery, sells Fords during the early twentieth century and works for an American promoter who takes most of the profits from his magic performances during the Great Depression; Herbert’s son sells his pet shop to American investors in the mid-twentieth-century; and the novel contains numerous criticisms of the takeover of Australian companies by Americans and the subsequent negative effects upon Australian culture.
I argue that Carey’s fiction examines the shift from British to American dominance of Australian culture, Australian consumption of American cultural productions (such as films and television programs), the effect on Australian culture of the influence of American individuals and corporations within the Australian economy, and the impact of American tourism; Carey depicts these influences and interventions by the United States as highly detrimental to Australian culture and as playing a significant role in perpetuating the cultural cringe.

Publication Type: Session Paper
Abstract: There are many different ‘realities’, that is, many different domains which might provide the main orientation of our practice, both singly and together. But intersecting those domains are structures that constrain what, on various scales, we take as our primary ‘reality’. These structures are, in part, based on the concentration of narrative resources in particular places, a material process that Carey captured.
There are, however, two ways of applying Carey’s dictum more specifically to media. Do media narratives literally, and completely, construct the only ‘reality’ that we can today live? Or is it only that the effect of media institutions’ symbolic power is to make it seem so? This paper will argue for the second interpretation, because it avoids mediacentrism, and better reflects the open-ended challenge (implicit in Levi-Strauss’s comment) to current media ‘realities’ from other sources of symbolic power, notably religion.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper approaches the question of the power of the press while viewing journalism as a cultural force, bringing together the thinking of Stuart Hall, James Carey and Michel Foucault. Hall’s model of culture incorporates power, but ultimately allows culture to be eclipsed by ideology. Carey makes space for an understanding of culture, but loses sight of power. These views are reconciled by applying a Foucauldian view of power as positive, distributed, unstable and ubiquitous.