Tara Brabazon

en

Tara Brabazon is the Dean of Graduate Research and Professor of Cultural Studies at Flinders University, Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA), and Director of the Popular Culture Collective. Previously, she has held academic positions in the United Kingdom, Canada and Aotearoa/New Zealand. She has won six teaching awards, including the National Teaching Award for the Humanities, along with other awards for disability education and cultural studies. She is the author of seventeen books. Her most recent monographs include Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness (2013) and Digital Wine: QR codes and regional development (2014). Three books have been published by Springer in 2015: Enabling University - (dis)ability, impairment and higher education, Unique Urbanity - renewal, regeneration and decay and Play - A theory of learning and thinking. Brabazon is author of 200 refereed articles and book chapters alongside journalistic works, having been a columnist for the Times Higher Education, Times Literary Supplement and Times Education Supplement. For further information, please refer to www.brabazon.net.

research

research expositions

  • The sounds of food: Defamiliarization and the blinding of taste (2017) author(s): Tara Brabazon published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    This essay – situated within the small but emerging field of sonic food studies and gastronomic auditory cultures – is positioned in the gap between the sounds of food and the meanings derived from the behaviors and practices encircling food. In food studies literature, assumptions abound about multi-sensory engagement. Yet, the sonic components of food remain undertheorized. This sonic research article – consisting of an sonic artifact and exegesis – emphasizes and prioritizes sensory incongruity. Intentionally, the non-eating sounds of the digital and analogue interactions surrounding food are summoned. There is a reason for the focus on these interfaces. Working with Viktor Shklovsky’s theorization of defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение), presented in his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” I am interested in reducing “automatization” and value “disruptions.” I have produced a sonic artifact that textualizes three slices of food sound: shopping for groceries, the delivery of food to a domicile, and cooking. These sounds were not slotted into a convenient narrative of a sonic documentary. They were not staged; they were not sound effects. There is a gap – of experience, expertise, perception, and meaning – between signifier and signified, the sound and its reception. The deferral of meaning creates hesitation, confusion, instability, and unsettles meaning systems.
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