New Deputy Director, thanks to Research Director

Jean Burgess has been confirmed by the ARC in the new position of Deputy Director. John Hartley has decided to step down from his role as Research Director to concentrate on his major project in the centre, Cultural Science, and also his continuing role in Risk and Representation.

Jean says this: “I am delighted to be taking on the role of Deputy Director at this moment in the Centre's history - a moment where our work is more relevant than ever, given the multiple national media and cultural policy reviews currently taking place against a backdrop of significant disruption centred around the digital media environment. It is also a moment which sees a number of new Chief Investigators and university nodes join the Centre, bringing with them new projects and new inputs to our forward research agenda, particularly in the digital media area. I am particularly committed to developing meaningful and productive collaborations across all the nodes of the centre, through sustained ongoing collaboration as well as strategic events like our regular Symposia and roundtables. I look forward to continuing the momentum that has been building among our outstanding Early Career Researchers. We have continued to receive very positive feedback from participants in our Emerging Scholars workshops, which have increasingly focused on providing opportunities for peer learning, collaboration and co-authorship. The sustained connections and relationships that are developing among our Early Career Researchers through the CCI have already led to new ideas and concrete collaborations; and will be an essential part of the legacy and future research agenda of the Centre.”

As we were able to do at July’s Symposium, this is again the place to acknowledge the tremendous role that John Hartley as Research Director has played throughout the life of the centre, and of course well before that in terms of the planning and work to make the original bid back in 2004. John’s thought leadership and exceptionally high standards of academic performance have set benchmarks that have lifted the centre and set its sights very high.

New partners

The centre has taken on an enhanced shape with the formal admission of UNSW, RMIT University and Deakin University as institutional partners. This means we can also warmly welcome new Chief Investigators Stephanie Donald and Larissa Hjorth (RMIT), Catharine Lumby (UNSW), and Deb Verhoeven (Deakin). Chief Investigator Denise Meredyth moves from Swinburne to RMIT as does Christoph Antons from Wollongong to Deakin. Our partnership with UNSW means that we will be holding our next symposium in Sydney from 16-18 November. We are currently finalising the symposium program which will be sent to all on our mailing list.

Our Advisory Board is also morphing. Farewell to Margaret Seares whose contributions to the board's deliberations have been characterised by great authority and value, particularly her role in urging us to develop a CCI ‘narrative’, the first draft of which is here: http://tiny.cc/5bstb. And welcome to Tony Bennett who has generously accepted our offer to join the Board, and will attend his first meeting in November. Tony joined UWS as Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory at the Centre for Cultural Research in 2009, and is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His influential work in the fields of literary theory, cultural studies, cultural sociology, and museum studies has been translated into many languages, and he has worked in a consulting or advisory capacity for a range of governmental organisations, including UNESCO and the Council of Europe, and conducted research collaborations with a wide range of cultural sector and government organisations in Australia and Britain.

CCI Symposium

Our symposium in late July, our tenth, was our best attended yet, with over 100 registrations for the main symposium and over 70 research higher degree students participating in the Emerging Scholars workshop. New QUT Creative Industries Executive Dean Rod Wissler welcomed delegates. The symposium opened with Advisory Board chair Terry Cutler addressing ‘The Big Picture: how socio-cultural research fits into the broader innovation framework’, proceeded by a panel on Policy Convergence featuring Malcolm Long, Terry Flew and Richard Eccles, leaders of current policy and review processes dealing with media and culture in Australia. There were also a number of international guests who featured as keynote speakers and discussion leaders around the symposium themes: policy convergence, social innovation and media ethnography—Yudhishthir (Raj) Isar, Professor of Global Communications and Jean Monnet Professor of Cultural Policy Studies at The American University of Paris; T.L. Taylor, renowned internet and games studies scholar based in the Center for Computer Games Research at the IT University of Copenhagen; and Arthur Grau, community manager and social network organiser for ‘Applications for Good’ at One Economy in the US.

Amongst much else, the symposium featured Benchmarker (see http://www.benchmarker.org.au/), a case study of policy- and industry-relevant research. The project got this notice from our Advisory Board Chair, Terry Cutler in a speech to Oracle Thought Leaders in August called Are we innovating enough?

"Another outstanding example of the value of granular sectoral data is the Creative Business Benchmarker developed by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation for the Queensland Government. This is a unique business tool that allows firms to compare their own performance to similar firms in Queensland, measuring firm productivity, profitability, growth and exports. For individual firms it provides a practical performance tracking and diagnostic tool, for industry associations it provides an authoritative and dynamic situation analysis, and for Government it provides, almost uniquely, a tool to track the impact of industry development initiatives and the return on investment. The greater deployment of such granular performance measurement tools would greatly enhance the evaluation of how innovation is working on the ground, and help to better focus the efforts of all parties."

The symposium also saw the launch of five books written or edited by Centre staff: Copyright Future Copyright Freedom edited by Brian Fitzgerald and Benedict Atkinson; Communication, Cultural and Media Studies: The Key Concepts (Fourth Edition) by John Hartley; Creative Industries and Economic Evolution by Jason Potts; China’s Creative Industries by Lucy Montgomery; and The Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights: Comparative Perspectives from the Asia-Pacific Region edited by Christoph Antons. The centre’s incredibly productive researchers continue to produce core academic outputs of high relevance and quality.

The feedback we have received from those who attended has been overwhelmingly positive, and we look forward to continuing the momentum and dialogue at our next symposium from 16-18 November at UNSW. Video and images of the July Symposium are now available at http://t.co/aXtyco4.

Our brilliant early career researchers!

CCI Senior Research Associate Mark Ryan played a key role in QUT’s purchase of one of the nation's largest collections of ozploitation and art house films. The titles were amongst 20,000 videos and DVDs put on the market after the closure of Brisbane’s much-loved cult film rental shop Trash Video. Over 500 zombie flicks and Ozploitation reels like Alvin Purple, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Mad Dog Morgan are now firmly ensconced in the university's archives at Kelvin Grove. The story was widely reported in the media including the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Screen Hub.

CCI PhD candidate Sonja Vivienne participated in The Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme this July, joining a multidisciplinary assortment of PHD researchers and presenters from around the world, discussing themes of ‘privacy’ ‘participation’ and ‘representation’ from computer science, social science, political, legal and cultural perspectives via a range of qualitative, quantitative and hybrid research methodologies. Sonja has blogged about her experiences at http://www.cciresearchspace.org/

Kylie Pappalardo, PhD Candidate in CCI and QUT’s School of Law, undertook the Master of Laws Program at Georgetown University in Washington DC From August 2010 to May 2011. Kylie graduated on the Dean's List and with the Thomas B. Chetwood S.J. Prize for the student with the best GPA in the LLM General Program. She shares her experience in her blog at http://www.cciresearchspace.org/ ‘One year in Washington DC’.

Policy developments in Australia

The CCI has been active in contributing to several inquiries and policy development processes happening this year. As reported to you last newsletter, Terry Flew is chair of a comprehensive review for the Federal Government into the classification of television, film, music, online content, video games and advertising. Recently CCI and Swinburne partner the Institute for Social Research (ISR), hosted the Content Crisis and Convergence Roundtable, which was attended by over 80 people at UNSW’s downtown campus. The Roundtable sought to provide a platform for those interested in what the research tells us about convergence, and how researchers and citizens can make a positive contribution at this important moment in Australian public policy. The event program and audio are available at http://tiny.cc/k3hxn (program) and http://tiny.cc/20zug (audio). The CCI’s substantial submission to the Convergence Review by Ben Goldsmith, Stuart Cunningham and Julian Thomas is available at http://tiny.cc/3tonq. A supplementary submission to the convergence review was prepared by Ben Goldsmith and Stuart Cunningham and is available at http://tiny.cc/l5jkc. And in his capacity as CHASS board member, Stuart Cunningham chaired a National Cultural Policy Workshop in Sydney in August. CCI is currently preparing a substantial submission to the National Cultural Policy process, after last year making a submission in the consultation phase (available at http://tiny.cc/x1s0f).

Essentially, the story of the CCI has been to give substance to the link between creative industries and innovation, to explore its implications for our core academic discipline fields and several policy domains and, working with industry and community, to assist in its application in practical circumstances. In short, it has sought to mainstream innovation in and through the creative industries for policy consideration, deepen it for academic engagement, and apply it for industry and community benefit.

The ‘object of study’ has been arguably more changeable over the period than fields of research intensity such as biotechnology, medical research or IT. Rapid developments, in particular in social media, have occasioned major social, economic and cultural impact. Significant theoretical work has been developed around economics and culture which attempts to feed into this volatile landscape. There is much further to be done.

This narrative is organised around the impact or ‘National Benefit’ claims the centre has set itself from day one. These are outcomes-based and thus most appropriate.

Download the full story here

On 24 March 2011, Attorney-General of Australia, the Hon Robert McClelland MP, asked the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) to inquire and report on the framework for the classification of media content in Australia.

Ramon Lobato and Mark David Ryan’s article Rethinking genre studies through distribution analysis: issues in international horror movie circuits has been published in the journal New Review of Film and Television Studies.

This report highlights a number of important trends, challenges and approaches associated with researching, monitoring and evaluating Communication for Development (C4D) within the UN context.

It is a key component of the Research, Monitoring and Evaluation (R, M&E) Resource Pack for C4D Programmes. This Resource Pack is being developed as part of an ongoing series of strategies that aim to institutionalise C4D within the International Development Agenda, demonstrate the contributions and impacts of C4D, and thereby strengthen C4D’s institutional position within the UN.

Guest edited by Elliott Bledsoe and Jessica Coates, this issue presents submissions by postgraduate students around the world working in media studies or related fields which critically examine the legal, social and technical parameters of open source, open content and open access.

Mark Ryan has recently guest edited the 'Australasian Horror' special issue for the journal, Studies in Australasian Cinema.

http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-issue,id=1906/

Life without the internet, a very new technology, seems almost unimaginable for most people in western nations. Today the internet is intrinsic to media and communications, entertainment, politics, defence, business, banking, education and administrative systems as well as to social interaction. The Internet disentangles this extraordinarily complex information and communication technology from its place in our daily lives, allowing it to be examined anew.

Australia currently lacks a mechanism to gather evidence on the formation of public attitudes to the introduction of new technologies, particularly the formation of attitudes to nuclear energy technology.

This is a limiting factor in achieving informed debate in the development of a national energy policy.

These are key findings in a research project recently completed by the National Academies Forum. Its report, Understanding the Formation of Attitudes to Nuclear Power in Australia, will be released today at a CEDA function in Perth (details below).

The Creative Economy Report Card provides a snapshot of key facts about Australia's creative industries, the creative workforce and businesses -- based on analysis of national statistics and reports.

Abstract

It has now been over a decade since the concept of creative industries was first put into the public domain through the Creative Industries Mapping Documents developed by the Blair Labour government in Britain. The concept has developed traction globally, but it has also been understood and developed in different ways in Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America, as well as through international bodies such as UNCTAD and UNESCO.

Julian Thomas
The Australian
February 22, 2010 12:00AM

CONFUSION and disarray surround Stephen Conroy's decision to rebate licence fees for commercial television broadcasters.

The decision raises the most basic question that can be asked about government dispensation of any kind: what was this money for?

There are young Australians who are already making a name (and money) for themselves in the latest market for creative content – and it didn’t exist a moment ago. YouTube is a huge repository of amateur content, but it is also rapidly evolving into a site that has legally contracted Hollywood movies and TV shows but is working out ways to share revenues from advertising with gifted and committed amateurs whose creativity attracts a big following.

Can government play a role in assisting Australian creative talent to catch some of dynamism of emerging markets for culture?

Outlining their radical new roadmap for cultural R&D, the authors’ proposals challenge two entrenched prejudices, which block arts and cultural organisations from playing their full role in society and economy.

Australian Financial Review

Creativity is today’s ultimate black box a Rorschach blot onto which there are projected innumerable meanings. When academic Richard Green reviewed the literature recently, he found so much variation that he concluded the field was ‘so attenuated, extenuated, or misunderstood that operationalising of the key concepts is missing or impossible’. He tried to order the field, and constructed a profile of 42 models of creativity which, when combined with assorted variations and typologies, totted up 303 variables!

This paper explores the rise of cultural economy as a key organising concept over the 2000s. While it has intellectual precursors in political economy, sociology and postmodernism, it has been work undertaken in the fields of cultural economic geography, creative industries, the culture of service industries and cultural policy where it has come to the forefront, particularly around whether we are now in a ‘creative economy’.

2020's focus on traditional arts funding came at the expense of our creative growth sectors, writes Creative Australia delegate Stuart Cunningham
The Australia 2020 Summit brought people from the heights and the streets together to meet and exchange ideas. It was an exciting concept that produced many valuable ideas.

Almost all creative ventures fail, but the successful ventures can be spectacular write Stuart Cunningham and Paul Ormerod.

The production of knowledge has become central to economic life. Competitiveness in the 21st century market place is now characterized by the ability to translate scientific and technological knowledge into innovation. But does this render cultural and social knowledge unimportant?