Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Media and Communications
| Contact Campus | Sandy Bay Campus |
| Building | Social Sciences Building |
| Room Reference | 520 |
| Telephone | +61 3 6226 2473 |
| Fax | +61 3 6226 7631 |
| Nicola.Goc@utas.edu.au |
Nicola is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism, Media and Communications. Prior to joining UTAS she had a career in news journalism and social history writing. Her PhD, Medicine, Medea and the Media (2007), looks at how news journalists create compelling narratives that frame mothers, whose children die in unexplained circumstances, as 'deviant' (the 'Medea Factor'). It analyses how the news media privileges sources and how this influences the media's representation of the maternal figure. Nicola is the co-author (with Jason Bainbridge and Liz Tynan) of the textbook: Media and Journalism: New Approaches to Theory and Practice (1st edition 2008; 2nd edition 2012; third edition forthcoming 2015), published by Oxford University Press. The textbook was developed within the JMC program at UTAS and has been widely taken up by journalism and media courses in Australian universities.
Nicola’s research interests also include: media and journalism history; the narrative structure of news; media and journalism ethics; the news image. She is particularly interested in how journalism frames women and girls from both an historical and contemporary perspective. She is principally interested in qualitative research that explores the intertextual relationships between journalism, the media and female subjectivity. Her research is focused on four main areas:
To view copies of selected journal articles and book chapters please go to E-prints on the UTAS website: http://eprints.utas.edu.au/
Nicola has supervised and am currently supervising projects that relate to:
She welcomes applications from intending PhD students with an interest in any of these areas and more broadly in journalism and gender, photography and gender and journalism and visual media history. Please feel free to contact Nicola about potential topics.
Women, Infanticide and the Press 1822–1922: News Narratives from England and Australia, by Ashgate (February 2013).
Women, Infanticide and the Press 1822–1922: News Narratives from England and Australia
In her study of anonymous infanticide news stories that appeared from 1822 to 1922 in the heart of the British Empire, in regional Leicester, and in the penal colony of Australia, Nicola Goc uses Critical Discourse Analysis to reveal both the broader patterns and the particular rhetorical strategies journalists used to report on young women who killed their babies. Her study takes Foucault’s perspective that the production of knowledge, of 'facts' and truth claims, and the exercise of power, are inextricably connected to discourse. Newspaper discourses provide a way to investigate the discursive practices that brought the nineteenth-century infanticidal woman - known as ‘the Infanticide’ - into being. The actions of the infanticidal mother were understood as a fundamental threat to society, not only because they subverted the ideal of Victorian womanhood but also because a woman’s actions destroyed a man’s lineage. For these reasons, Goc demonstrates, infanticide narratives were politicised in the press and woven into interconnected narratives about the regulation of women, women's rights, the family, the law, welfare, and medicine that dominated nineteenth-century discourse. For example, the Times used individual stories of infanticide to argue against the Bastardy Clause in the Poor Law that denied unmarried women and their children relief. Infanticide narratives often adopted the conventions of the courtroom drama, with the young transgressive female positioned against a body of male authoritarian figures, a juxtaposition that reinforced male authority over women. Alive to the marked differences between various types of newspapers, Goc's study offers a rich and nuanced discussion of the Victorian press's fascination with infanticide. At the same time, infanticide news stories shaped how women who killed their babies were known and understood in ways that pathologised their actions. This, in turn, influenced medical, judicial, and welfare policies regarding the crime of infanticide and created an acceptable context for how society viewed these women. Alive to the marked differences between various types of newspapers, Goc's study offers a rich and nuanced discussion of the Victorian press's fascination with infanticide.
Contents: Introduction; Part I Infanticide News in the London Times: 1822-1871: Personal tragedies, public narratives: 1822-1833; A press campaign and the 1834 new Poor Law; The 1860s maternal panic. Part II Infanticide News in the Regional Press: 1830-1922: Infanticide in the Van Dieman’s Land press; ‘Bush madness’ in the Mercury; ‘The Hinkley girl-mother’ and the Leicester Mercury; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
Research Project/s