By Alejandra Canales, Matt Campora, Maija Howe, and Duncan McLean
We are honoured to once again collaborate with NiTRO in presenting this edition on Ethical rules of engagement in storytelling, creative collaboration, the classroom and beyond.
Over the last few years, the creative industries have faced a series of reckonings in relation to the ethics, or lack-thereof, underpinning our industries and outputs. While questions about the lack of diversity and ‘authenticity’ in the creative arts have circulated for decades, the spotlight shone by #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite; broader social movements like Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQIA+ movement; and the rise of First Nations voices have set in motion a much-needed ethical re-evaluation of the status quo. In creative collaboration and commercial relationships, the ends no longer justify the means.
In diversity of representation, audiences expect better; as do practitioners from marginalised communities who have long been excluded from telling their stories and representing their cultures to mainstream audiences. The ethical dimension of what we do as artists and storytellers, and of how we do it, has come to the fore. And in doing so it’s presented challenges to both creative professionals and the educational institutions that seek to prepare them. How do we develop more relationally conscious creative practices? How do we simultaneously acknowledge the significance and influence of works from the past and the role that an exclusive, unrepresentative canon has played in limiting our understanding of artistic merit and importance? How do we encourage students to be ethical practitioners, ensuring they have an awareness of and preparedness for the ethical dilemmas they will face in the creative industries? These challenges are also opportunities to reshape creative industry and education, moving beyond the limitations of established ways of doing towards more inclusive and empowering systems.
This edition of NiTRO engages with this contemporary ethical ‘reckoning’, exploring the ways in which ethical considerations are currently reshaping creative and educational systems and practices.
In this edition of NiTRO:
Dr. Deborah Turnbull Tillman (UNSW) and Anna Tow (UNSW) share how traditional hierarchical models of teaching and learning can be disrupted through the incorporation of immersive learning experiences built on more typically female modes of learning via social systems.
River Heart (AFTRS) discusses the need for the creative industries to change the way they think about accessibility and inclusion by shifting from a medical to a social understanding of disability.
Dr. Gerard Reed (AFTRS) considers how we can prepare creative students for the ethical dilemmas they will confront as creative professionals in a fast-evolving industry through the use of collaborative media.
Kate Stone (AFTRS) considers the importance of ethical values to effective screenwriting, particularly when approaching the construction of characters, even those we aren’t supposed to like or agree with.
Dr. Alejandra Canales is the Head of Research at AFTRS and an award-winning documentary filmmaker who has worked across performance, theatre, installation, film and VR exploring the poetics of practice. Her documentaries have been broadcast on ABC and screened at several festivals worldwide, including IDFA, Sheffield DocFest (UK), The International Documentary Association in Los Angeles; Melbourne Film Festival and Sydney Film Festival.
Dr. Matthew Campora is the Head of Screen Studies at the AFTRS and the author of Subjective Realist Cinema: From Expressionism to Inception (2014).
Maija Howe is a Lecturer in Creative Practice and Theory at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). Her writing has appeared in publications such as Senses of Cinema, The Moving Image, and Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, The Archive, the Web. She has a background in media arts, working on projects like Cameraman (Sam Smith, 2011) and Terror Nullius (Soda Jerk, 2018), and is currently the Acting Course Convenor for the Master of Arts: Screen program at AFTRS.
Dr. Duncan McLean is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at AFTRS, where he works with aspiring screen practitioners and storytellers to help them understand the frameworks and discourses that are shaping their industry and informing their creative work. Duncan has published articles on genre blending and revisionism, and has previously published in NiTRO on the demise of the traditional authorship model in the changing screen industries.