CCI SYMPOSIUM - Registrations are now open!

The eleventh symposium of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) brings the Centre together around themes of key drivers of the socio-cultural research agenda, methodologies for researching the digital domain, journalism futures and the current media inquiry, innovation from the informal media domain, and creativity by design in Asia.

We welcome several colleagues from outside the Centre as speakers at the symposium: Eileen Baldry, UNSW; Fiona Martin, University of Sydney; Patrik Wikstrom, Jönköping International Business School; Tony Bennett, UWS; Brian McNair, QUT; David McKnight, UNSW; Hallvard Moe, University of Bergen; and Elspeth Probyn, University of Sydney.

Special features of this symposium include:

* a roundtable on ‘Convergence. Once more, with feeling’, the centrepiece of a cocktail event hosted by Gilbert & Tobin
* a symposium dinner at Coogee Beach
* an evaluation session on the impact of the centre so far
* social activities at and around Coogee Beach.

To register for the Symposium please visit the registration page.
For more information please visit the Symposium webpage or email infocci@qut.edu.au

Session summary

Session 1: The digital domain and methodology

This session brings together a diverse group of researchers to discuss current practices and future directions in social science and humanities methodologies as they apply to the 'digital domain' - from the changing nature of the 'content industries' themselves, through to the impact of digital media on the practices of creative workers, and everyday users of digital media technologies.

Each of the panellists will draw on their specialist knowledge of current developments in their own fields and disciplines to address the following questions:

1. What do you see as the strongest current methodological trends in research on the 'digital domain'?
2. Where are the emerging methodological gaps – that is, are there pressing research problems that require the development of new methods, techniques and tools?
3. Do you see a need for new or reconfigured combinations of methods, within or across disciplines?
4. What are the implications for graduate education and research training?

Session 2: Key drivers of the socio-cultural research agenda

Big concepts like culture, economy and the social are never stable categories – what counts for them changes over time and therefore their relationships must be established, not assumed. How does this demarche play out for a future socio-cultural research agenda?

At the same time, communications, cultural and media studies are engaging with quantitative methods around the emerging research paradigms of computational humanities research, marked by ‘born digital’ methods. This approach may extend the relevance of socio-cultural research well beyond the critical debates about digital versus established media.
Exciting new work in behavioural economics has been applied to the problem of coordination and governance of common-pool assets. Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for this work. Is this work relevant to the emergent digital commons and what might be a research agenda that can secure that application?

Session 3: New directions in journalism and the current media enquiry

Journalism in Australia (and globally) faces multiple challenges: declining revenues for traditional platforms, rapidly changing industry and professional structures, and still-uncertain business models for online platforms. Audiences and markets are fragmenting, as consumers of journalism turn increasingly to social networking platforms, aggregators and other outlets to source their information. Consumers of news are increasingly also producers, contributing to and participating in news production through user generated content distributed on platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.

These trends challenge organisations and news professionals, and there has been much talk of the 'crisis of journalism' in recent years, but the digitisation of information and communication also creates new opportunities, by enabling journalists and their organisations to develop new models of inquiry, such as data or computational journalism, and to develop more interactive, personalised news brands through a sustained and engaged presence in online spaces. At the political level, the role of media in Australian politics, and the quality of public discourse as mediated through the emerging digitised environment, has become a major issue, exacerbated by the UK phone-hacking scandal involving News Corp. The recently announced media inquiry will explore a range of issues affecting Australian news media, including the implications of digitisation for privacy and ethics, and ownership structures. These developments in the technological, economic and political spheres raise questions for the future agendas of journalism research and education, which this panel will address from a multinational perspective.

Session 4: Informal media economies

This session considers ground-level creative practices occurring at the fringes of, or entirely outside, the creative industries. It is often suggested that innovation emerges from the margins, exerting pressure on industry to adapt and transform. An enlarged view of the innovation process can therefore include peripheral activities occurring outside (and often in antagonistic relation to) the formal content industries, as well as in illegal or extra-legal contexts. This panel brings together CCi researchers working on this general process from various angles, showcasing a diverse series of views on the relationship between formal and informal media systems.

Session 5: Asia

This session looks at ongoing work by researchers in the Asian Creative Transformations area in CCI. The participants will discuss emerging issues related to design: this includes design of regulatory policy as well as design of space, buildings, content and media. We are particularly interested in the tension between formality and informality, between official and popular culture, between definitions of youth and the mutability of definitions, between mainstream and fringe communities. A key topic area in relation to China therefore will be instances of shanzhai culture, which represents a challenge to the dominant model of regulated behaviour. The question of how policy and law (deliberate action) interacts with the market activity (competition) and with grassroots innovation (household production) will be taken up. We will discuss comparative instances of shanzhai culture in other Asian countries.

Session 6: CCI Narrative - Evidence for the value-add of the centre

The CCI has been up and running for six years. What has it achieved in this period? What impact has it had, and on what parts of academic knowledge, policy, industry and/or community? What kinds of evidence is available to support claims of such impact? What is its international standing, and what has it contributed to training the next generation of scholars? CCI's Advisory Board considered a paper on this topic the 'CCI narrative' at its last meeting. This document is available as the key background paper for this session. Download CCI narrative