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

and young people. In doing so, I consider the saliency of the juncture between cultural studies, educational
theory and youth studies for thinking beyond, through a reconceptualisation of Indigenous childhood and
youth via what I term “acts of regeneration”.
Charlotte Craw Designing for democracy: Visualising parliamentary processes in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
electoral education, 1962-1990
In this paper, I analyse historical examples of electoral education materials produced specifically for
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander audiences. Created after the universalisation of Aboriginal suffrage in
1962, these materials endeavour to visualise the infrastructure and processes of the Australian
parliamentary system for communities with very different governance structures. They employ a variety of
strategies ranging from 1960s flashcards to the 1988 comic book The Phantom Enrols and Votes, the first
Phantom comic to be set in Australia. By comparing and contrasting the earliest attempts with later
examples produced in the 1970s and 1980s, I reflect on the ways in which the visual and narrative elements
of these materials reflect important social and political changes in the conception of democracy, civics
education and the representation of Indigenous Australian peoples’ political agency.
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Mediated Intimacies: Bodies, Relationships, Technologies (Chair, Sarah Baker)
Alison Winch
Mediated Intimacies: Bodies, Relationships, Technologies
This paper reflects on the key themes that have emerged from the special issue of Journal of Gender Studies
(forthcoming 2017) that this panel is co-editing on “Mediated Intimacies: bodies, relationships,
technologies”. The special issue investigates the ways that a media convergence culture represents,
intervenes in, exploits and enables intimate relations. In particular it looks at the various ways that intimacy
is being reconfigured in response to the specific historical conditions of the neoliberal conjuncture. On the
one hand we are living in atomized and individualistic times where relationships are increasingly strategic
and competitive. On the other the media has become, as Beverly Skeggs argues, intensely intimate. This
paper interrogates the concept of mediated intimacies. What are the different configurations of intimacy
possible in the neoliberal conjuncture? Are they different from what went on before? Is the notion of
intimacy changing according to the affordances of different technologies? Are there new concepts of
intimacy emerging? Are some forms of intimacy enabled and others constrained by the multiplicity of
platforms that offer opportunities for connections with others as well as with oneself?
Misha Kavka & Rachel Berryman* “I Guess A Lot of People See Me as a Big Sister or a Friend”: The Role of
Intimacy in the Celebrification of Beauty Vloggers
With an impressive eleven million subscribers, Zoe “Zoella” Sugg is among the most popular of the young
adults who have recently obtained fame (and fortune) by posting videos to YouTube. She figures
prominently in the beauty group, one of the fastest-growing and most overtly feminised subsets of the
YouTube community, creating videos on lifestyle, fashion and beauty-related topics. However, to a greater
extent than many of her peers, Sugg supports her product-oriented videos with vlogs that offer behind-thescenes,
intimate access to her life(style). In so doing, Zoe’s videos encourage intimacy not simply between
her viewers and the “big sister” persona she adopts on-screen, but also between her audience and the
commodities she associates herself with. This article argues that the success of the YouTube “influencer”
economy, both in terms of its gender predispositions and celebrity effects, depends on processes of
commodification through intimacy, which Zoe Sugg mobilises in exemplary fashion.
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