Tara Brabazon
Tara Brabazon (3 January 1969 -) is Professor of Communication at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada.[1] Born in Perth, Western Australia, she was previously the Professor of Media at the University of Brighton, Associate Professor of Media, Communication and Culture at Murdoch University in Australia and held lectureships at the Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
A specialist in online education, popular culture and cultural history, she has published ten books. Her best known monographs are Digital Hemlock: internet education and the poisoning of teaching (2002) and The University of Google (2007), which both focus on building an information scaffold for students managing the information age. She has also written extensively on popular culture, including Thinking Popular Culture (2008) and in 2005, published From Revolution to Revelation: Generation X, Popular Culture, Popular Memory and edited Liverpool of the South Seas: Perth and its popular music. Calling attention to the interplay between nation, identity, representation and popular culture, Tracking the Jack: a retracing of the Antipodes (2000) and Playing on the Periphery: sport, memory and identity (2006), investigate the historical iterations of culture and iconography between the United Kingdom and the Antipodes. More recently, The Revolution will not be downloaded: dissent in the digital age was published in January 2008, and Thinking Pop: war, writing and terrorism was being published by Ashgate in June 2008.
A finalist for Australian of the Year in 2005, she has also won awards for postgraduate supervision, disability education and teaching excellence. In 1998, Brabazon received the Australian Award for University Teaching (Humanities). She is also a public commentator on cultural and political issues, and was a features writer for the Times Higher Education (THE). She has previously published feature articles in both The Times and The Guardian.
Brabazon is also director of the Popular Culture Collective, a nonprofit community organization whose stated goals are to "create thinking - and thoughtful - popular culture."[2] She is married to Steve Redhead, Professor of Legal Studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.[3] They live in Oshawa.
She received some media and online coverage for 'banning' students on her courses from using Google and Wikipedia in their first year of study.[4] Currently she is completing this argument in the third book of her Digital Hemlock trilogy, titled Digital Dieting.
Her Inaugural Address at the University of Brighton in 2008 was titled "Google is White Bread for the Mind."[5]
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.socialscienceandhumanities.uoit.ca/EN/main/faculty_staff/brabazon.php
- ^ Popular Culture Collective. "Mission Statement of the PCC". Popular Culture Collective. Archived from the original on 2008-05-20. http://web.archive.org/web/20080520020652/http://www.popularculturecollective.com/mission.htm. Retrieved 2008-06-04.
- ^ http://www.socialscienceandhumanities.uoit.ca/EN/main/faculty_staff/redhead.php
- ^ Andrea L. Foster (2008-01-17). "The Wired Campus". The Chronicle of Higher Education. http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2673/the-university-of-google. Retrieved 2008-06-04.
- ^ University of Brighton (2008-01-07). "Google is white bread for the mind". University of Brighton. http://www.brighton.ac.uk/news/2008/080107googleiswhitebread.php?PageId=810p. Retrieved 2008-01-18.
