FEATURED AUTHOR

Maria Elena Indelicato

Lecturer, International Vice Director Huallywood Film Research Center
Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University

Dr Maria Elena Indelicato is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, China. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Australia. She developed her dissertation in the monograph the Australia’s New Migrants, where she approaches international students as subjects of the Australian border and related national emotions of compassion and resentment.

Subjects: Asian Studies, Education, Gender & Intersectionality Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, Sociology & Social Policy

Biography

Dr Maria Elena Indelicato is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University, China. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney, Australia. Her dissertation explored the intersections of race and emotions in Australian public discourses on migration and multiculturalism with regard to ‘Asian’ international students. Following, she developed her dissertation in the monograph Australia’s New Migrants, where she approaches international students as migrants to be – that is, subjects of the Australian border and related national emotions of compassion and resentment.
          During her stay at the University of Sydney, she pledged allegiance to Aboriginal people’s struggle for sovereignty in a passport ceremony in 2012. She also collaborated with Warraimay historian Dr Victoria Grieves on the ARC research project ‘More than family history: race, gender and the Aboriginal family in Australian history’. Currently she is developing the research project ‘A Transnational History of International Education: Education, Race, Coloniality and the Politics of Knowledge’ where she deploys both settler colonialism and race as heuristics to unravel the ways in which anti-indigeneity, anti-blackness, and orientalism have differently yet jointly shaped current discourses on international education. In this project, she employs a genealogical method which approaches international education not so much a market driven phenomenon as a legacy of discourses on the education of natives, blacks and other differently racialised subjects in the UK’s ex imperial colonies of USA, South Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
          Reflecting her research interests in race feminism, multiculturalism, border politics, migration, international education, feminist cultural studies of emotions, colonial history, and cinema, Dr Indelicato has committed herself to design and teach media studies courses which instil and develop in students a race feminist intersectional and decolonial approach to the study of media. In this regard, she is also endeavouring to translate her courses Race, Cinema and Nation and Queer Race: a Decolonial Approach to the Study of Gender and Media into a media studies textbook which privileges sexuality as a lens to the study of the intersection of colonial, anti-blackness, and oriental discourses in past and present media representations.
          Dr Indelicato, has published in feminist, race and cultural studies journals such as Outskirts: Feminisms along the Edge, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies e-Journal, Chinese Cinemas, and Inter-Asia Cultural Studies besides several chapters on edited books on settler colonialism, cinema, and international education.

Education

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Race Feminism, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Emotions, Gender and Sexuality, Queer Theory, Cultural Studies, Settler Colonialism, Decolonisation, Indigenous Epistemologies and Methodologies, Migration Studies, Border Politics, International Education, Critical Policy Analysis, Feminist Media Studies, and Transnational Chinese Cinemas.

Books

Featured Title

Articles

'No Such Thing as Standard Beauty'

Published: Sep 30, 2017 by Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge, vol. 24, 1-8
Authors: Sarah Cefai and Maria Elena Indelicato
Subjects: Media and Cultural Studies

In this paper, we explore the connections between performances of race, class and gender. Their discussion of race and representation investigates the ways in which the models participating in America’s Next Top Model inhabit a ‘double bind’ of embracing as well as masking racial, ethnic and class difference.

Beiqing, Kuqing and National Sentimentality in Left-behind Children

Published: Sep 02, 2017 by Donald, Stephani, Emma Wilson and Sara Wright (eds.) Childhood and Nation in Contemporary World Cinema
Authors: Maria Elena Indelicato and Zitong Qiu
Subjects: Media and Cultural Studies

In this chapter, we argue that contemporary Chinese films position left-behind children as an object of compassion as part of a national sentimental fantasy that their impoverished life conditions can be ameliorated by means of affective identification, that is, without questioning the unfair redistribution of socio-economic resources between rural and coastal China.

‘China loves Italy’: Transnational Co-Production between China and Italy Behind

Published: Apr 12, 2017 by Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Journal, vol. 18:1, 47-60
Authors: Yongchun Fu and Maria Elena Indelicato
Subjects: Media and Cultural Studies

In this article, we tapproach the co-productions between China and Italy as exhibiting a “trans-border pattern” which satisfies interests beyond both the market and ethnic affinity. We trace the history of such a “pattern” to provide exemplary cases of a non-market oriented affinity between two culturally distinct nations: China and Italy.

Research Notes Towards a Definition of Huallywood

Published: Apr 15, 2016 by Journal of Chinese Cinemas, vol. 10:1, 54-60
Authors: Yongchun Fu, Maria Elena Indelicato, Zitong Qiu
Subjects: Media and Cultural Studies

In this research notes, we position Huallywood non so much an industrial phenomenon as a theoretical paradigm which seeks to supersede previous attempts to define what counts as 'Chinese' in transnational Chinese films.

Australia's 'Colombo Plan: the Beacon of Western Knowledge in the Asia-Pacific

Published: Sep 30, 2015 by CRAWSA e-journal, 11:1, 1-16
Authors: Maria Elena Indelicato
Subjects: Education

this article demonstrates the discursive complexities underpinning the successive positioning of Asian countries as equal partners of Australia in the process of internationalisation of higher education. Further, it shows the pernicious persistence of the Australian colonial imaginary in shaping the understanding of Asian students as subjects essentially lacking the characteristics marking the epistemological superiority of the West.

“Backdoor Entry”: A Genealogy of (Post) Colonial Resentment

Published: Jan 06, 2015 by Griffith, Michael (ed.) After Colonial Governmentality: Biopolitics and Memory in the Postcolony, Ashgate
Authors: Maria Elena Indelicato
Subjects: Education

This paper offers a genealogy of backdoor entry as an expression of illicit or undesired entry into Australia. The framing of debates through the trope of backdoor entry is not exclusive to current mass media representations of asylum seekers but dominant in governing discourses on un-desired migration in Australia. The essay makes this argument through the case study of the problematisation of Asian International Students’ entry and stay in Australian migration policy