Lauren O'Mahony

Strategic sustainability communication has the potential to acculturate internal and external organisational contexts. Strategic sustainability communication could broaden societal values and social learning while building collaborative networks toward societal, environmental, and economic well-being. Arguably, internal and organisational communication is the starting point to convey and achieve an organisation’s sustainability messages and goals. Thus, this chapter takes a two-pronged approach to strategic sustainability communication from an organisational perspective. Firstly, as we argue, a necessary precondition for communication for sustainability is several considerations for sustainable employee engagement. These considerations are grounded in an approach that allows for reflectivity and encourages radical leadership thinking towards a decentralised leadership approach. Such an approach may be facilitated by the strategic communication professional as the broker of collaboration. This, arguably, contributes to the establishment of an innovation culture for curiosity-driven knowledge within an organisation. Such a culture has the potential to build a transdisciplinary response to complex problems. Secondly, these considerations for sustainable employee engagement collectively serve as enablers for communication about sustainability, addressing the sustainability issues and goals of the organisation while encouraging a desire within employees to extend these sustainability practices outside the organisation.

American Movie Classics’ (AMC) popular television series The Walking Dead (2010–present) transports viewers into an apocalyptic zombie dystopia where the lines between safety and precarity, being governed and governing, or being alive and/or dead slip and change. Utilizing Achille Mbembe’s term “necropolitics”, the article explores The Walking Dead’s representation of governance and power in terms of individual and group security. While the zombie has been understood as the liminal figure par excellence, The Walking Dead’s non-zombie characters illustrate diasporic liminality as refugees, hovering on or near the threshold of death. The scale of suffering or prosperity is determined by who leads or governs. Frequently, those deemed “in charge” exercise power and control to discipline, to punish, and to provide security. The series offers a metaphor for the potential uses of power in biological, environmental, or natural disaster situations where survivors grapple with scarce resources and the constant presence of death.

Almost 50 years ago, Edward Said wrote on 'the other' in relation to race and gender in his path-breaking book Orientalism (1978). While much has evolved around notions of gendered and racialised otherness since then, Said's conceptualisation still resonates today. Our paper reports on a 2020/2021 survey of Women of Colour in the Australian workplace. The survey was conducted during the pandemic by Women of Colour Australia, a not-for-profit group, working with the lead author. We focus on the qualitative answers from participants, many of which detail sometimes painful and extremely personal workplace experiences. More than 500 Women of Colour, including seven per cent who were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, completed the survey. Sixty per cent said they had experienced discrimination in the workplace, despite 59 per cent of participants saying their workplace had a Diversity and Inclusion policy. Participants had to 'perform' their identities whilst being subjected to intersectional issues of racism and sexism, some of which the pandemic exacerbated. Our paper describes the harmful ramifications of gendered othering of Women of Colour for Australian organisations and society in the years of the pandemic.

This chapter draws upon existing approaches to screen violence to explore The Walking Dead’s challenging representations of death including controversial episodes where child characters die from fatal violence. We explore how the show positions viewers to interpret extreme violence, especially how violence is accepted or rejected within the narrative context. At times, the show’s narrative works to justify and/or legitimise an aggressor’s conduct, thereby minimising the likelihood of audience rejection of the narrative and/or backlash against the show. We draw upon key analytical tools from Revilla et al. (Communications 46(1):4–26, 2021) and Riddle and Martins (J Commun 72:33–58, 2021) to explore the context of fatal violence, punishment for violent acts, consequences, seriousness, graphicness and explicitness as well as justification and legitimation, particularly relating to child characters. How audience members are positioned in relation to violence may impact their views or understandings of violence or even how they may model certain behaviours in real life (Revilla et al., Communications 46(1):4–26, 2021; Riddle and Martins, J Commun 72:33–58, 2021). In this chapter we argue that violence leading to the death of child characters on The Walking Dead tends to contain low levels of graphicness and explicitness and is often combined with careful narrative justification or legitimation to explain the reasons for that death.

At the time of writing, the global pandemic COVID-19 is an ongoing world health crisis. One of the many ramifications of the pandemic is the impact on universities and colleges worldwide (Leung et al. 2020; UNESCO 2020; WHO Regional Office for Europe 2020). The disruption to classes that would usually involve face-to-face learning, the discontinuation of exchange programmes, and the spread of the virus, in general, has led to alternative methods of education using distance or online learning…

This chapter examines the evolution of Australia’s popular romance fiction from the mid-eighteenth century through to today’s mass-market publishing phenomenon. The chapter defines Australian popular romance fiction, explores how the genre has changed since its inception and discusses the production and consumption of Australian romance novels. Key developments in the genre since the year 2000 are then explained to argue that Australia’s romance fiction industry is today both vibrant and highly successful.

This chapter examines one example drawn from Australian chick lit, specifically several novels by best-selling Aboriginal author Anita Heiss. It argues that Heiss’s chick lit serves an educational and political purpose: her novels repurpose characteristics of the wider genre to represent Indigenous women navigating romantic, professional, and cultural scenarios. Anita Heiss’s “Koori lit” novels broaden what constitutes chick lit and subsequently challenges previous assertions that the genre is dominated by “white women.” The chapter explains several distinct textual strategies employed in Heiss’s Koori lit to prompt readers to reflect on Aboriginal culture, identity, and history. Like many chick lit novels, Heiss’s Koori lit utilizes the basic narrative conventions of romance while engaging with love and romance thematically to offer a cultural critique. Identifying the “society defined” where the romance occurs is especially important in Heiss’s Koori lit because it is largely a representation of contemporary Australia including its cultural politics.