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

opportunity to deliver on this promise for children everywhere. Under the right circumstances, digital media
can open up new possibilities for increasing children’s awareness of their rights, and enhancing their lived
experience of their rights. However, the global community is a long way from acknowledging and realising
the potential of digital media to support children’s rights. This presentation reflects on a Young and Well
Cooperative Research Centre project in which 148 children (aged six to 18) from 16 countries and speaking
eight different languages, participated in workshops to generate and share their views on their rights in the
digital age. We discuss the ways that the idea of children’s rights is being mobilized in relation to children’s
technology practices internationally, and identify ways to leverage children’s digital practices to support
their wellbeing.
9S
Everyday ethics and wellbeing (Chair, Lisa Heinze)
Debbie Rodan* & Jane Mummery* Everyday ethical purchasing: How can multplatform tools facilitate citizens’
participation towards social change for animal welfare?
Studies reveal tensions between activists’ desires for justice and social change and consumers’ lack of care in
– and perceived barriers concerning – ethical purchasing, and desires for choice and pleasure in
consumption. Questions have been raised as to whether ethical consumerism is too entangled in consumer
capitalism to achieve long-lasting social change and new norms in animal welfare. Activist, consumer and
industry debates around free-range eggs in Australia exemplifies this entanglement, with new changes
(March 2016) in permitted free-range stocking density causing an upsurge in public debate. Concerning this
issue, our interest is with the development and maintenance of public debate as a mechanism for social and
everyday change, particularly with how the engagement of digital technologies might advance activist aims
and consumer change. Specifically we explore how digital culture and the use of multi-platform tools might
facilitate citizens’ participation towards a social change that prioritises animal welfare over consumer
interests.
Tess Lea* & Alifa Bandali*
Just say yes: organ donation, performance culture and the ethics of intensive care
On any given day in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPA) in Sydney Australia,
clinical staff will be managing the urgent needs of people who are otherwise dying. If you are under the age
of 60, and going to die in a hospital, the ICU is the most likely place this will happen. Patients coming into
this windowless, machine-led, world are extremely sick as they veer between life and death. The
complicated question of persevering is repeatedly confronted. Will pressing forward place them in
unwarranted pain, trauma or disability, given their chances of surviving? Every decision around multiple
variables precipitates a cascade of new consequences. There are no agreed thresholds for these minute-byminute
calibrations, for what is to be tolerated in terms of patient anguish, trauma, cost or quality of life. To
be of any use, clinicians must moderate their own emotions and, with as much sensitivity as such profound
uncertainty allows, manage the stress of everyone else, as they carefully encourage or extinguish hope
through euphemisms and strategic empathy. “Intensive care” thus precisely names not only the clinical
interventions but the exquisite, multi-directional emotional labour involved. Enter this space a new pressure:
that of encouraging organ donation rates. Given Australia’s comparatively low donation rates, clinicians and
allied professionals are being trained in new forms of emotional management aimed at having donors and
their next of kin “just say yes” to donation. “No” becomes an “opportunity to reach a more durable decision”
(aka a “yes”). But this is not just about encouraging consent. Increasing rates additionally implies a shift in
emphasis in the highly contestable grey zone between dying-unviability-potential donation. Clinicians have
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