Tue 21 Aug 2007
I’d like you all to meet the Porticus Fellows with whom I shared my research. They’re all brilliant minds and beautiful friends with some pretty exciting work happening around them.
These lovely people are Paulo Gasparetto and Milja Radovic. Paulo lives near Porto Alegre in Brazil. He was born in the Veneto and, since his Italian was better than his English and my Italian was better than my Portuguese, we managed to have some pretty cool conversations. His research is on the mediatisation of public religion (Catholicism) in Brazil, and in particular a case study on a religious television station called TV Cancao Nova, out of which a massive religious movement has been born. He has a lot of interesting stuff to talk about on how television has aided the movement of the Catholic Church in Brazil away from liberation theology towards conservatism, even a certain brand of evangelicalism. I hope the fellowship will be able to get his work translated into English.
Next to him in the picture is Milja Radovic. Milja is from Serbia and is studying at the University of Edinburgh. She is studying how national religious ideology (namely Serbian Orthodoxy) is being promoted and subverted in Serbian films. It’s a blend of textual analysis and reception theory, around film as sites of ideological struggle and resistance.
This is Patricia Bustamante, from Colombia and studying at the University of Rome. She is researching the interplay between religion and modes of communication in indigenous communities. Her case study is the use of radio to promote tribal narratives, symbols, values and beliefs among the Nasa tribe in southwest Colombia. Patricia promises me the grand tour should I ever manage to get there, so I’m making plans for 2008 (after a short stop in Porto Alegre via Serbia).
The guy on the left in this picture is Juan Carlos Enriquez (2006 and 2007 recipient of the Paul Teusner prize for the planet’s coolest name). He is from Mexico and studying at Boston College. His research is on how popular media impact on the operational belief systems of audiences, and his case study is on popular esotericism, and the response of audiences to films such as The Da Vinci Code and What the Bleep Do We Know?. He’s done a lot of audience research in Mexico and South America, so most of his data is in Spanish (bummer – yet another language to learn). Next to him in the picture is John, the University of East Africa’s Vice-Chancellor’s personal assistant. He spent the entire conference with us, making sure we had everything he wanted. So naturally he worked extremely hard. Everything we could ever want was at our disposal, even a car (and driver) should we want to escape.
Here are Africanus Diedong and Joseph Vallikatt. Africanus has recently completed his PhD with the fellowship, and now is the director of the communications department for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops in Ghana. From his presentation we were impressed at how huge his department is (I think most Ghanaians are Catholic, thus quite big dioceses), and his responsibilities include oversight of Catholic publications as well as the presence of the bishops in the secular media. Thank God George Pell aint one of his bishops – with a PR job like that we would never see him again. Africanus also studied in Rome, so a lot of Italian was spoken in Nairobi that week.
Joseph is from India, and will join me at RMIT University in October to start his PhD. He has got a cool idea for his research – religious narratives and symbols in multimedia gaming, and how players use these to construct religious identities. I think he may even be interested in looking at diasporic groups of young people and how ethnic identities are also formed in participation in gaming culture. I reckon he’ll spend a lot of time in Box Hill, but as soon as he arrives down under he’s heading up to Shepparton to spend a weekend with me and my playstation. Serious work, this.
