Just a heads-up that I am updating and shuffling around some content following the new site design. I’m aiming to publish a few posts that have been sitting in my drafts for many moons and to start adding new content on a more regular basis.
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Here is the first installment of an ongoing series of posts about garden gnomes. 
As a cultural object, there’s a lot of about the garden gnome that deserves unpacking. Issues of ideology, class, race, gender, superstition, consumerism and aesthetics are all tightly tucked under that pointy red cap. To understand how these issues come into play, we first need to understand how it has become popular– even polemic— to decorate suburban yards with colorful and diminutive old men.
While clay figures of dwarfs were sold by the German company Baehr and Maresch as early as 1841, a craftsman named Philipp Griebel is generally credited with popularizing the bearded fellows we’re familiar with today. Continue reading “A Fascination with Gnomes (Introduction)”
Since it is now official, I’m pleased to share news of my candidacy in the doctoral program at Charles Sturt University.
Below is a brief summary of the proposed research that I will be exploring over the next few years:
Media convergence has led to new digital, multi-modal and hybrid forms of storytelling (i.e., transmedia storytelling) that encourage processes of participation, collaboration and remediation. Current research suggests that stories evolve across platforms and spaces through the sense making and information sharing practices of fan communities. Information behaviour as a critical lens represents a valuable and, as yet, underused approach to unraveling the individual and collective information practices generated by media convergence and transmedia storytelling. I propose to address this gap in the research by identifying and studying the information behaviours of transmedia fan communities. As such, the proposed project will seek to determine if and how media convergence is altering the ways in which consumers make sense of, engage with, and share narrative productions. Such a study has far-reaching implications in the discipline areas of Education and Information Studies, as well as in Arts, Media and Communications.
For the not-so-brief summary, have a look at the Transmedia Fan Communities project page.
