The School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London

Interests / Disciplines

Since 1997 I have been centrally involved in building up SOAS as a centre for the study of non-Western media and film. As a critical anthropologist, I am especially interested both in practices of media production, distribution and reception, and in how media and cultural studies’ scholars reach their generalizations, which often seem ethnocentric and over-interpretive.

Teaching

Before the Media & Film Programme became a separate entity, I was involved in developing contemporary human science theory courses in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology over some twenty years, as well as rethinking regional ethnography courses through an analysis of the hegemonic texts that defined regions, cultures and important issues. I have devised courses on semiotics and ethnographic film. Currently I teach approaches to television and audiences, popular film in maritime South East Asia and Theoretical Issues in Media and Cultural Studies, the core course of the new MA in Critical Media and Cultural Studies and organize the MPhil Research Training Programme.

I am also convenor of the Media and Film Studies Programme, Postgraduate Tutor for the Programme and Director of Studies for the MA in Critical Media and Cultural Studies. With Annabelle Sreberny, I am also the SOAS representative on the steering committee of the World Media Project, the joint SOAS-Goldsmiths Media Research Centre.

Since 1990 I have been engaged in building up archives of Indonesian television materials for educational use. This project now has an archive of some 2,000 hours of recordings of cultural broadcasts on Indonesian television, which comprises part of the Balinese and Javanese Research Archive (BAJRA), of which I am director. We are currently working with the leading centres of performing arts in Indonesia to produce a series of audio CDs and DVDs of important performances of music and dance; and also on an archival project to record the works of young choreographers and composers.

Having spent some eight years in Indonesia, mostly in Bali, perhaps unsurprisingly I have a strong interest in performing arts and their mass mediation. With the Balinese singer-dancer, Ni Madé Pujawati, I have developed a series of lecture-performances on aspects of Balinese dance and opera. We are also working on the translation and analysis of a performance of Arja, Balinese dance-opera, in multimedia format.

Courses Taught

• Dissertation in Media Studies
• Emerging Digital Cultures in Asia and Africa - Theory and Practice
• Rethinking Audiences
• Theoretical and Contemporary Issues in Media and Cultural Studies
• Theoretical Issues in Media and Cultural Studies

Research

I have worked on Balinese culture and indigenous philosophy, and Indonesian discourses of development, from 1970 until it became difficult to ignore the impact of television even in rural areas. The mass media raised ethnographic and theoretical challenges about how to analyse and understand what was happening, which led me to research audiences and media-related practices during the 1990s. My current research spans a number of aspects of media and cultural studies.

At present I am researching changes in contemporary mass media in Indonesia. In particular I am interested in the role of television, radio, print and the Internet in framing public discourse – how Indonesians imagine themselves and others in different media. This is part of a longer-term project on how maritime South East Asians are represented in Euro-American media as against how South East Asians understand themselves and the rest of the world in their media. I am trying to address the problems of over-interpretion of media ‘content’ by looking at intermedia commentary and, through ethnography, at production practices in a television studio and newspaper in Central Java to understand how Indonesians engage with the media in their professional and personal lives.

The current theoretical confusion in media and cultural studies has attracted my long-standing interest in the philosophical problems in the human sciences. For disciplines that began in theoretical critique, media and cultural studies are now remarkably under-theorized and critiques from post-structuralism and elsewhere largely ignored. So I have written recently about the presuppositions behind ideas of articulation and representation, culture, media and the human subject, as part of a forthcoming collection of critical theoretical essays.

Another research interest is performance, media and audiences. From 1989-1999 I worked on theatre in Bali as a key means by which Balinese argued over who they were and their place in the world. Central issues were how audiences understood what was going on and what happened when culture became increasingly mediated by television. This led to a study on regional television and the articulation of ideas of culture in Indonesia. The research has raised questions of performativity and practice: theoretically in thinking of media subjects as performances, and practically in thinking about camera work, lighting and editing, for example in Asian MTV, new TV genres and film.

Expertise

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Available for

Regional Expertise

• South East Asia

Country Expertise

• Indonesia

Languages

Publications