NiTRO + Creative Matters

Perspectives on creative arts in higher education

Practice: Queer Representation Matters

BY NATALIE KRIKOWA — This research critically examines the evolution of queer representation in screen media and interrogates whether meaningful progress has been made.

Queer Representation Matters (2023) is an interactive, online documentary that responds to ‘The Seeing Ourselves: Reflections on Diversity in TV Drama Report’ (Screen Australia 2016), which details the deficiency of inclusive storytelling in Australian scripted TV.

The methodological approach, resulting artefact/s and discussions stimulated by the project not only advance scholarly discourse but also demonstrate innovative approaches to scholarly research that engages with audiences outside the academy, and thereby enriches the research and its impact. 

Through a curated selection of video clips, interviews, and textual examples spanning decades, users are invited to traverse the historical trajectory of queer representation in media. The i-doc transcends traditional academic boundaries, leveraging participatory digital media to democratise access to discussions of media representation. By engaging media professionals, students, and wider audiences in interactive dialogue, this project fosters greater understanding and empathy for the importance of representation in media narratives.

GO TO Queer Representation Matters (Krikowa, 2023)

Dr. Natalie Krikowa (she/they) is a media scholar and creative practice researcher at the University of Technology Sydney. Natalie holds a Doctor of Creative Arts in media and cultural studies and currently teaches in digital media and screenwriting. Natalie’s research focuses on issues surrounding LGBTIQA+ representation in screen studies, popular culture, and transmedia. Natalie’s queer-focused creative works include The Newtown Girls (2012), All Our Lesbians Are Dead! (2017), and Queer Representation Matters (2023), underscoring her commitment to amplifying LGBTQIA+ voices and narratives through storytelling.

More from this issue

Palimpsest Series

BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration

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Practice.

BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined

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A Gathering.

BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric

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Insanity Helps

BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It

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Literally In

BY KENDREA RHODES – This work is an audiovisual expression of the messiness of being me. A visual artist, a

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Review

In ‘The long and winding road’ (NiTRO, Edition 20, 2019), Professor Carol Gray offers up ‘an alternative way of considering

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More from this issue

Editorial
BY Carina Böhm, Didem Caia, Clare Carlin, Emilie Collyer, Ruth Fogarty
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practice research
BY JOSHUA IP – The interrogation of practice is a common task faced by practice-based researchers. As a PhD candidate the Practice Research Symposium programme in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT, focusing on the discipline of Creative Writing, I have attempted to interrogate my wide-ranging practice as poet, editor and literary organiser for the past six years.
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How life gets in: poem and essay
BY ANNE M. CARSON – Disrupting, interrupting and sometimes derailing study in both welcome and unwelcome ways; life gets into PhD projects in a plethora of ways, so much so that there often seems to be no hard boundary between them. This essay uses the example of synchronicity as one way that ‘life gets in’.
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Palimpsest Series
BY PATRICIA AMORIM — In my Palimpsest Series, I explore cultural identity from a feminist perspective through self-portraiture, drawing inspiration from the concept of a palimpsest and the work of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta.
Read more +
A Beginner’s Mind: From Ball-Hating HDR to Basketball Coach
BY JENNY HEDLEY – In this reflective essay, a time-poor single mother and PhD candidate accidentally takes on the role of basketball coach as she seeks to achieve balance between scholastics and life.
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Between – Cabbage Tree Creek, April-July 2023
BY MICHAEL DONEMAN – Between is a reflection on loss and renewal. It interweaves personal, cultural, and environmental stories near the country where I live, by a waterway at the edge of the Boondall Wetlands called Cabbage Tree Creek.
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Write, stitch, unpick
BY CLAIRE WELLESLEY-SMITH – The use of textile as a creative recording method alongside my PhD (2023, The Open University) extended a practice I began in 2013. Stitch Journal is a long length of linen cloth, pieces added in sections.
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‘Where a language is opening’
BY SUSIE CAMPBELL – Before an unexpected brush with serious illness, the journey of my PhD research project seemed clear. I set out to engage with the avant-garde Modernist poetry of Gertrude Stein in order to draw on her experimental approach to language for my own processual model of poetic practice.
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Practice.
BY EMILY WOTHERSPOON – This piece is a reflection on how life, research, and creative practice become blurred and intertwined through the process of undertaking PhD creative writing practice research.
Read more +
A Gathering.
BY DANI NETHERCLIFT – This work, in alignment with the topic of my creative arts PhD regarding the elegiac lyric essay, is written with the conventions of the lyric essay, utilising white space, non-linearity, image, archive, fragment, association and braiding.
Read more +
Insanity Helps
BY INDYANA HOROBIN – This is a short experimental article that engages with how life subsists within PhD study. It is styled as an interview with the self and is punctuated by interactions between the interviewers which descend into hostile conversations.
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My Life IS my PhD Research
BY JENNY HICKINBOTHAM – Life didn’t GET IN to my PhD research, my life IS my PhD research.
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Literally In
BY KENDREA RHODES – This work is an audiovisual expression of the messiness of being me. A visual artist, a writer, doctoral researcher, and a psychiatric survivor.
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Writing Life: reflections on parenting, poetry and practice-based research
BY ISABELLA G. MEAD – This creative response to ‘How Life Gets In’ details my experience maintaining a creative practice while also being a PhD candidate and a parent to young children.
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How voluntary assisted dying turbo-charged my doctorate
BY LAINIE ANDERSON – Life didn’t get in the way of my PhD. Death did. Or more specifically, it was South Australia’s Voluntary Assisted Dying Bill (2020).
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Degrees of Separation
BY DANTE DeBONO – ‘Degrees of separation’ is a reflective consideration of the ways in which creators navigate the complexity of their internal writing processes as unique configurations of their lived experiences.
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From the Archives
BY SMILJANA GLISOVIC — With the first edition for the year we’re going into the NiTRO archives to trace how some of the key concerns of the last 12 months have developed since the start of the DDCA publication.
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Review

In ‘The long and winding road’ (NiTRO, Edition 20, 2019), Professor Carol Gray offers up ‘an alternative way of considering the role of artefacts / creative works in a doctoral submission, by offering the liberating concept of ‘epistemic objects’ – their possible forms and agencies, and the alternative display/sharing of the understandings generated from these […]

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Thriving Futures + Leadership
SMILJANA GLISOVIC—This edition of NiTRO Creative Matters takes its theme from this year’s DDCA annual symposium Thrive, with an attendant interest in Leadership. For some time the DDCA Board and membership have been discussing the necessary relationship between thriving and leadership, identifying that for creative practice researchers to continue to thrive, and for the field to continue to develop, we need to cultivate our leaders. In our visioning of creative practice researchers stepping into leadership positions we need to explore what leadership looks like for the creative practice researcher and the disciplines we work in.
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While ERA Sleeps… The New REF Awakens
PAUL GOUGH, CLIVE BARSTOW—While Australia needs to be highly selective when taking direction from a re-booted Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK, there are ultimately a few modifications and shifts in focus that could benefit the arts here once the ERA awakens from its slumber.
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