Seeking connections across constellations: a reflection on Tom O’Regan

ABSTRACT

This article reflects with affection on the work of the late Professor Tom O’Regan, in his interwoven capacities as scholar, teacher, colleague, friend, catalyst, and generous mentor to younger scholars. It attempts to convey the intellectual openness, curiosity, and conversations with others that shaped his research in Media and Cultural Studies, and to make visible the skeins of connective tissue across his many collaborations and projects. It traces the recent trajectories of his ideas from cultural discourse to policy, to audience measurement, to media platforms and algorithmic culture. It attends to his particular ability to see how seemingly disparate people, events, objects, and ideas related to each other, and to bring these elements into conversation with each other. Tom O’Regan’s desire to map interlocking systems of media, of technology, of institutions, of culture, was always geared towards an understanding of where points of intervention could best happen. I argue that his long-standing attachment to the writings of Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour did not just shape his research, but also his sense of his own role, responsibilities, and capacity to act in the service of others within the structures and networks of the contemporary Australian university.

KEYWORDS:

• Tom O’Regan
• Australian Screen Studies
• intermediality
• platform media
• academia
• networks
• institutions

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. That said, I was one of the next generations who benefitted from the growing accessibility to higher education that these reforms allowed. It provided a slim opportunity to escape the trap of low-wage and low-skilled labour in which I had fallen in my early 20s.

2. For recent scholarship on the way images and videos of actual death circulate and are consumed across media platforms, please see Stratton (2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Bode

Lisa Bode is Senior Lecturer of Film and Television Studies in The School of Communication and Arts, at The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. She is the author of Making Believe: Screen Performance and Special Effects in Popular Cinema (Rutgers: 2017), and the co-founder with Leon Gurevitch (Victoria University of Wellington) of The Visual Effects Research Network. Her research has been published in Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies; Screening the Past; Convergence; Cinema Journal, and various edited collections. She is currently writing a book, Deep Fakes and Digital Bodies on Screen for Rutgers University Press, to be published in 2022.