Margie Borschke

Margie Borschke is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Media and the Associate Head the Department of Media, Music Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University.She is the author of This is Not a Remix: Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

Borschke's research addresses reproduction, circulation and distribution as cultural practices, with an emphasis on the aesthetics of circulation, the materiality of networked media, and the rhetorical dimensions of Internet culture. Recent work has focused on cloud-based computing, streaming technologies, and analog media revivals, using a media historical approach to address pressing contemporary questions about the social impact of network technologies and how we understand change and innovation. An interest in copies and copying underpins much of her work. Current and recent collaborations include projects on desire lines and imagining data in everyday life, network metaphors, new media gatekeeping practices and technologies, social media pedagogies, post-piracy practices, scholarly networks, the pleasures of the copy, and media histories of the environment and natural world.

Dr. Borschke teaches undergraduate and postgraduate units in media studies and journalism including units on network culture and data journalism.

Current research supervisions: Kath Kenny (A feminist media history of “the personal is political” in Australia) and  Timothy Yee (Critiquing the Internal Innovation Imperative Through Arts Based Research in Australian Corporations).

Completed Supervisions: Kath Kenny, Master of Research, 2016 ("A (feminist) drug story: raising consciousness or the mother of a neoliberal guilt trip?"); Adrian Chen, Master of Research 2016 ("The gamer and "The Game": pick-up artists from the perspective of game studies");  Timothy Yee, Master of Research, 2017 ("Podcasting personas in the creative knowledge industries.  

Dr Borschke is  interested in supervising research in the following areas: media theory, the rhetorical dimensions of media, circulation as a cultural practice, media archaeology, media history, network aesthetics,  sound studies, format and platform theory, technology and software studies, underground and alternative media, collecting practices, social media, enviromental humanities, innovation and media practice.

Borschke holds a PhD in Media (University of New South Wales), a Master of Arts in Politics (University of Toronto) and a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Political Science (McGill University). As a journalist, she trained at Harper’s Magazine in New York City in the mid-90s and went on to contribute to both pioneering websites and respected international media titles including The New York Times Magazine, The Times, Harper’s Bazaar and many others.

This is Not a Remix: Piracy, Authenticity and Popular Music

Borschke’s 2017 monograph, This is not a remix: piracy, authenticity and popular music (Bloomsbury Academic) focuses on questions about the materiality of media, its use and the aesthetic dimensions of reproduction and circulation in digital networks. This work uncovers the analog roots of digital practices and brings the long history of piracy into contact with contemporary controversies about the reproduction, use and circulation of recordings on the internet. Through a close look at sometimes illicit forms of composition--including remixes, edits, mashups, bootlegs, mp3 blogs and playlists--Borschke ponders how and why ideals of authenticity persist in networked cultures where copies and copying are ubiquitous and seemingly at odds with romantic constructions of authorship. By teasing out unspoken assumptions about media and culture, Borschke’s work offers fresh perspectives on the cultural politics of intellectual property in the digital era and poses questions about the promises, possibilities and challenges of network visibility and mobility.