Associate Professor Joseph Pugliese

Full description

Associate Professor Joseph Pugliese is Research Director of the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies.

Joseph's research and teaching are principally oriented by issues of social justice. He deploys critical and cultural theories in order to examine and address the relationship between knowledge and power, issues concerned with discrimination and injustice, state violence, institutional racism, and regimes of colonialism and empire. He examines these issues in the context of everyday cultural practices, institutions of power such as the law and the state, and the interface of bodies and technologies.

His current research includes a critical analysis of regimes of torture and state violence in the context of the CIA Black Sites and the US military's use of Predator Drone technologies in the ongoing 'war on terror. His documentary "Contemporary Colonialism and the Struggle for Aboriginal Determination" was screened on SBS TV and was nominated for the Australian Society for Education Technology Award (1996), receiving a Commendation; it was also nominated for the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Award (1996).

Joseph's most recently published work includes the monograph: State Violence and the Execution of Law: Biopolitical Caesurae of Torture, Black Sites, Drones (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013).

In 2010 he was nominated for the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize, Brandeis University, U.S.A., in recognition of his research and social justice work on race, ethnicity and racism.

In 2010 he was awarded Macquarie University Arts Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award "For inspiring students to learn critical thinking skills, oriented by an ethics of social justice, in order engage in learning as a transformative experience."