Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

symptomatic of the working class in general, but also has been carefully cultivated through the discourse of
meritocracy, “a core principle of governance in Singapore” (Low, 2014). However, as a principle that offers
equal opportunities, not outcomes, it has increasingly been criticized for creating inequality and elitism. I
argue that meritocracy, as national or governing ideology, is part of the superstructure machinery and
should be identified as an ideological state apparatus which reinforces the patterns of consumption that
perpetuate social and class status quos. Through an analysis of the family’s consumption habits and their
socio-economic aspirational leanings, this film unveils and critiques the cultural hegemony behind the
dominant discourse of meritocracy in Singapore – a discourse that is constructed for a specific mode of
consumption that feeds and maintains the myth of a meritocratic society.
Rachael Wallis Living the dream: conceptualising rural life in Country Style magazine
Lifestyle migration serves to enhance ongoing transformations of the self through the enactment of ideals
found within social imaginaries. This work, part of a larger research project into lifestyle migration, examines
representations of place presented in the Australian magazine Country Style, where readers choose to
suspend disbelief to inhabit the magazine’s symbolic space portraying an imaginary rural ideal. The lifestyle
illustrated is an idealised myth that minimises, excludes or romanticises harsher aspects of rural reality while
enabling and encouraging consumption that commodifies the process of becoming. Three themes are
discussed, including authenticity, rural abundance and personal transformation. This discussion contributes
to understanding of the representation of rural life in popular media and to an area of lifestyle migration
research that is not widely represented in the literature. It differs from previous work on lifestyle migration
by offering insights into the way social imaginaries work through myths in a popular magazine.
Kylie Cardell
Life Capture: Mediated memories, self-help, and a “good life”
What kind of life will you leave for others to find? Who will excavate the “real you” from the digital clutter, a
mass of self-documentation lying unprocessed (unproductive, unorganised) on devices or in the cloud? In
this paper, I explore the rise of commercial journaling and scrapbooking websites, such as the Australian
“modern school of memory” Life: Captured, Inc., or U.S. based digital scrapbooking empire Becky
Higgins.com. Addressing a contemporary subject adrift in flows of everyday visual ephemera – haunted by
their raw and unorganised photo archives, by memories not yet made, by a lack of “story” – these
enterprises sell services and training that speak to broad contemporary anxieties about the “virtualness” of
digital lives. In doing so, there is a drive to the material – “Our mission is to help people document their
stories and create timeless, tangible keepsakes to be treasured for generations to come” (Life: Captured,
Inc.,) – that is also a rhetorical and ideological stance. A “good life” must be preserved (created); it is
narrated, illustrated, organised, and it is beautiful.
8U
Testimonies of violence and displacement (Chair, Raka Shome)
Meyda Yegenoglu
The Unexperienced Experience of Genocide: Testimony, Secrecy and Community
The Turkish official narrative denounces Armenian genocide by invalidating the factuality of the fact.
However as Marc Nichanian suggests genocide is destined to annual itself as fact, as the essence of genocide
is the destruction of the archive. Primo Levi suggests that the logic of the executioner is based on the
understanding that the no accurate facts are to be found. What is at issue in trying to come to terms with
the Armenian genocide is not the factuality of the “event” but the experience of those who survived. The
only archive that is left is the survivors’ testimony. However testimony does not establish factual truth. Nor
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