The other driver: an analysis of the construction of culpable subjectivities in advertising aimed at reducing motor vehicle related injuries and fatalities.

Author: Kylie Jane Doyle

Doyle, Kylie Jane, 2013 The other driver: an analysis of the construction of culpable subjectivities in advertising aimed at reducing motor vehicle related injuries and fatalities., Flinders University, Flinders Law School

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Abstract

This study endeavours to understand the imagined capacities of road safety advertisements that cluster around the notion of fear. The thesis looks at the creation of governmental messages concerning road safety by analysing the assumptions they make, unpacking the truth games at work and mapping the projected impacts of the texts. More significantly the thesis looks at: how spectators make meaning of such texts; why spectators are affected by them; and why they feel what they do. Each substantive chapter of the thesis deals with the capacity of such texts, exploring how an affective encounter might play out and exposing the lack of control that governments have over these texts they use to manage road traffic populations. In this way the thesis grapples with how fear inducing texts address the spectator through a reliance on the binary subject positions of self and other. The thesis attempts to go beyond these binary notions of subjectivity, explicating a conceptualisation of the subject which sees bodies as not being defined by moments of failure or moments of ethical behaviour but rather as bodies that move into and out of the proximity of criminal other and ethical self at every juncture. In doing so the thesis endeavours to create a force of becoming: in fear of crime scholarship, the way we conceive the criminological offending paradigm; and in the perception of the nuanced notion of otherness.

Keywords: Subjectivity,Road Safety,Affect,Aesthetic,Fear of Crime,Criminal Offending

Subject: Law thesis

Thesis type: Doctor of Philosophy
Completed: 2013
School: Flinders Law School
Supervisor: Prof Mark Halsey