Patricia Wise

After an initial career in secondary teaching in Canberra 1973-1989, since 1990 I have developed and taught cultural theory courses across multidisciplinary programs in arts and humanities at Griffith University, including a five year period as Head of School on the Gold Coast campus, and other management roles. With a background in literary, cultural and media studies, I became involved in national and international cultural policy research. Over the past 15 years I have increasingly turned to urban studies. My current research focuses on fashioning appropriate analytics for the rapid transformations typical of ‘new’ cities and their regions, particularly in relation to the complex, untidy intersections between people, place, space, culture and milieux that characterise such regions. Other research involves comparison of ‘old’ and ‘new’ world coastal resort cities, and especially the often surprising exchanges of styles/captures of code that arise despite disparate histories and development contexts. Conceptual strands running through all of my work include difference, singularity, gender, affect, spatiality, relationality, communities, local experiences, global perceptions, border crossings and transformations. I tend to draw on Deleuze and Guattari, Massey, Grosz, Probyn and Agamben, along with many past and present thinkers utilising related ideas and processes. Once I was no longer undertaking cultural policy work, my collaborative research has included the use of the arts with asylum seekers