Genre, Power, and Cultural Adaptation

This project analyses how Australian cinema has produced and normalised masculine power across five decades, treating film as a diagnostic cultural archive rather than a mirror of social attitudes. Using a genre-relational framework across frontier, domestic, industrial, criminal, and institutional cinemas, it shows how toxic masculinity adapts rather than collapses under critique, recalibrating into less visible but more durable forms of authority. The project develops a portable framework for understanding how masculine power persists through routine practices, institutional legitimacy, and moral narratives.

Media, Evidence, Credibility, and Power

With Huw Nolan and Tarryn Corlett

This project examines witnessing as a contested cultural infrastructure through which truth, credibility, memory, and responsibility are produced and managed in contemporary societies. Analysing film, television, documentary, museums, digital platforms, and surveillance cultures, it investigates how publics are trained to interpret evidence, manage doubt, and assign legitimacy. The research focuses on moments where witnessing fails or produces harm, developing a comparative framework for understanding why visibility increasingly outpaces accountability.

Transmedia Fandom, Healthy Masculinity, and Queer Joy on Screen

With Erin Burrell

This project analyses Heated Rivalry (Crave, 2025) as a case study in how queer television, BookTok culture, and streaming distribution generate global fandom and cultural impact. It argues that the series’ success emerges from its sustained representation of healthy masculinity, consent, emotional literacy, and care within a hyper-masculine sporting culture. The research examines transmedia fandom, creator transparency, and Canadian screen industry infrastructure to show how popular culture can reimagine masculinity, intimacy, and spectatorship at scale.on goes here

Affect, Power, and Cultural Formation

With Tess Ezzy

This project analyses how Australian film and television have produced, regulated, and reimagined girlhood across five decades, treating screen culture as a diagnostic cultural archive rather than a mirror of social attitudes. Using a genre-relational framework across youth drama, suburban realism, crime, speculative fiction, and coming-of-age narratives, it examines how girlhood operates as a site where vulnerability, aspiration, care, discipline, desire, and moral responsibility are culturally organised. Rather than positioning girlhood as a purely developmental stage or identity category, the project conceptualises it as a historically adaptive formation shaped by institutions, environments, media infrastructures, and national imaginaries.

Embodiment, Affect, and Everyday Media

With Tess Ezzy

This collaborative project examines how film and television represent food, eating, and sensory experience as sites where embodiment, memory, class, care, and cultural identity are negotiated. Moving beyond food as spectacle or lifestyle content, the research analyses how taste, texture, sound, rhythm, and ritual shape affective attachment and social meaning across domestic drama, reality television, documentary, and art cinema. Drawing on sensory studies, material culture, and screen aesthetics, the project positions food media as a key site where bodies, emotions, everyday ethics, and relational power are trained, regulated, and imagined.