Cultural Geography

Geographies of Sound and Music

Non-representational Theory

Affect Theory

Media and Subjectivity

Scholarships of AUD$35,000 are available for PhD students who achieved H1 /High Distinction in their UG program and/or have completed a Masters by Research. If you are interested, contact me at g.burdon@unsw.edu.au. 

I am particularly looking for candidates interested in undertaking the following PhD projects:

Cultures of attention: the politics of affect in C21st media

In the C21st, Mark B.N. Hansen describes, media is no longer something we choose to consume but something that has become an inescapable part of our experience of the world. Beginning from this premise, this project explores how affect is therefore increasingly part of the infrastructure of everyday life in the West. It aims to understand how affect is produced and circulated in deeply interconnected accumulations of sounds, images, devices, ideas, bodily capacities, networks, platforms and algorithms. Specifically, the project aims to construct a theoretical framework for understanding the ways in which these new conditions of human experience shape cultures of attention, a phrase designed to capture the fact that the traditional language of human choice and individual decision-making is inadequate for understanding the ideas and events we pay attention to in the world today. Through a series of digital ethnographic analyses of everyday forms of media engagement, the project aims to shed light on how contemporary media work by modulating affect and therefore shaping attention, in ways that have political implications. In doing so, the project will create important new knowledge on social scientific concepts of affect and attention as well as on the broader cultural and political implications of today’s pervasively mediated worlds.

Sound art and the production of subjectivity: ethico-aesthetic experiments in sonic experience

This project foregrounds sound art as a generative but underexamined area of focus in contemporary human geography. The discipline has a long history of engaging with the visual arts, however at present there is very little research on the ways of thinking, perceiving and feeling that are opened up in encounters with sound art. The project aims to address this gap by analyzing sound art pieces and recordings, demonstrating their relevance to contemporary human geography by exploring how they generate new ways of thinking about the relations that bind body and world. Constructing an innovative theoretical framework for analyzing sound art that draws upon and extends Felix Guattari’s concept of ‘ethico-aesthetics’, the project will show how encountering works of sound art functions to produce particular kinds of subjectivity in its listeners in ways that hold ethical implications for rethinking the forces that shape and mould human thought and behaviour today. Of particular interest to the project are works of sound art from Black and Indigenous practitioners whose works encourage critical reflection upon the production of subjectivity in Western, capitalist societies. Through documenting and analysing a series of encounters with sound art works, the project aims to build resources for the ethical project of re-singularising subjectivity in the context of the devastation wrought by Western models of perception, thought and evaluation.