Susan Luckman

GIS, Ethnography, and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping

This article discusses how geographic information system (GIS) technologies were used to enhance ethnographic methodologies within a cultural research project, Creative Tropical City: Mapping Darwins Creative Industries. It shows how mapping technologies can broaden the scope of data available via interview practices and produce innovative ways of communicating research results to stakeholder communities. A key component of the interview process was a “mental mapping” exercise whereby interviewees drew sketches, revealing important sites and linkages between people and places. A GIS linked responses to real-world locations, collating and displaying them in meaningful ways. Responses uncovered Darwins unique geography of creative inspiration—a geography that preferences Darwins natural environment over sites of urban creative milieu.

Going Bush and Finding One's 'Tribe': Raving, Escape and the Bush Doof

For over a decade now, the outdoor rave-derived event (be it called a ‘doof’, ‘party’, ‘gathering’, ‘festival’ or suchlike) has been embraced by the Australian rave-derived scene. This particular model for outdoor dance communion resonates in a country blessed with a sunny climate and large swaths of undeveloped land. More specifically, psy-trance-inspired doof has furnished Australia’s alternative party people with the vehicle par excellence by which to realise the dream of PLUR (the early rave motto which stands for Peace, Love, Unity and Respect), and community. At what are often called bush doofs, as at other similar dance music events, by means of the repetitive drum beats, frequent substance use, the sensory overload of the environment, the ecstatic crowd, the moving body, individual or collective reflection or meditation, or any combination of these factors, participants seek to transcend their quotidian lives. This article will consider some of the ways in which the ritual of such events figures in the lives of participants. In so doing, two key issues will be considered. Firstly, why is it that events based in the country are so popular, given especially dance music’s links with both audio and visual technologies and urban subcultural practices? Secondly, and more contentiously, in their own ways bush event promoters and participants both often draw upon spiritual and cultural references from a wide range of sources. While it is not possible to explore all the issues this raises here, given that bush doofs involve a relationship with the Australian landscape, it is important to critically examine the ways in which Aboriginal iconography, peoples, and their relationships with the land, are evoked by a group of people of overwhelmingly European racial origin. Therefore, in the second half of the article, the issue of cultural appropriation will be examined in relation to the Maffesolian ‘neo-tribes’ populating the transitory space of the bush doof.

Life in a northern (Australian) town: Darwin's mercurial music scene

In the present article, we seek to bring critical attention to the idea of ‘scene’ in relation to musical activity in Darwin, an iconic northern, remote, (post)colonial city. The idea of ‘scenes’, in the sense of ‘connections between audiences, musicians, industry and infrastructure’ (Street 1995, 255–63) is pervasive in music scholarship and journalism (Cohen 1999). The word ‘scene’ has a certain linguistic utility, and it conveys a sense of social allegiance and interaction imbued with positive overtones – of people hanging out, creating music and experimenting together, and sharing aural pleasures. Whether explicitly or by default, the corpus of music scene research has been particularly attuned to the uniqueness of place. Ethnographic methods invariably focus research in particular places (Cohen 1995; Bennett 2000) and, more often than not, locational discourses permeate talk of ‘scenes’ to the extent that a scene and its place are often considered inseparable – a form of ‘place-consciousness’ (Street 1995; Connell and Gibson 2003). In some places, musical ‘sounds’ become associated with place because of their genesis in scenes that emerged in particular eras around certain venues, record labels, shops or city districts (Cohen 1994; Connell and Gibson 2003; McLeay 1994; Mitchell 1997). Accordingly, geographical detail and depth characterizes much music scene research.

Women's Micro-Entrepreneurial Homeworking: A ‘Magical Solution’ to the Work–Life Relationship?

Abstract Enabled by the global distribution affordances of the Internet, increasing numbers of creative producers of the handmade—the majority of whom are women—are working from home as sole traders. Selling their wares via online marketplaces such as Etsy, such women often do so as a means by which to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment. In this article I argue that rather than seeing the exponential growth of an online craft economy as a ‘back to the future’ moment for the status of women, these business practices are best seen as part of the process of the folding of the economy into society, a process which Lisa Adkins has located as positioning the home as an increasingly productive space for both men and women.

Tropical cosmopolitanism and outdoor food markets in (post)colonial Australia

In this article I offer a critical examination of Darwins contemporary food markets and, in particular, the Mindil Beach Night Markets, as sites of ‘tropical cosmopolitanism’. To do so, I focus on the intersection of place and food to illuminate what it reveals about the rich and complex history of cultural exchange on this small city site and, in turn, what this may reveal about contemporary postcolonial multiculture. As a high profile and significant place, both geographically and socially, Mindil Beach furnishes the researcher with a rich cultural text through which the various affordances of space and food reflect broader politico-cultural thinking. Within such a framework I consider the erasures and silences, presences and absences contributing to the degree to which the multiculturally rich Mindil hawker stalls can be considered demonstrative of a national vision of cosmopolitanism that is truly postcolonial, and hence more than simply ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ (Beck 2007).

Micro-enterprise as Work-Life ‘Magical Solution’

One response by middle-class women across the global West to the competing demands of post-Fordist conditions of both paid and unpaid work is the outsourcing of domestic labour to less economically empowered and often precariously employed women. Another response, not mutually exclusive to this, and which is also on the rise, is the adoption of a more ‘do it yourself’ approach, one which involves career-shifting to work from home. Enabled by the worldwide distribution affordances of the internet, increasing numbers of creative producers of the handmade — the majority of them middle-class women — are working from home as sole traders, often as a means by which to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment and/or bring in top-up family income. The very taken-for-granted-ness of communications and other digital technologies as everyday devices sees them playing a determining role in normalising the home office and home studio, additionally collapsing the already porous relationship between work and other aspects of life. Further, and at a more specifically gendered level, being able to work from home and/or flexibly has been embraced by many women as an important compromise between paid work and unpaid domestic responsibilities. This is especially so for a particular cohort of largely educated, Western middle-class women in their late 20s and into their 30s — key childbearing years — amongst whom ‘[m]otherhood itself is [currently] being venerated in a way not seen since the hypernatalist 1950s’ (Matchar, 2013: 3–4).

Craft Revival: The Post-Etsy Handmade Economy

Craft, the handmade and making are currently everywhere. As Jakob has observed, ‘No longer a sequestered and quaint domestic leisure activity, crafts and DIY … have redefined their images and social stigmas with progressive agendas of emancipation, individualization, sub-cultural identification and anti-commercialism as well as emerged as a multibillion-dollar industry’ (2013, p. 127). That is, ‘Crafts are currently being rediscovered not only as a hobby but also as a desirable enterprise’ (Jakob 2013, p. 127). For this reason I begin this chapter, perhaps a little counter-intuitively, with a different kind of ‘craft’: the making and selling of alcohol. Though prima facie this may appear a strange starting point from which to begin our journey into the contemporary craft economy, given the last few years have also witnessed an explosion of craft micro-brewing around the industrialised world, in many ways it is inevitable that these paths cross. Within the space of a single week I came across two separate instances where yarn-based craft was employed to market alcohol. The first was the unlikely sight of a crocheted label on a draught cider tap for Matilda Bay’s Dirty Granny Matured Apple Cider behind the bar at a local pub.1 Photographs of similar crochet labelling feature on other aspects of this product packaging such as bottles and boxes. In many ways this is a ‘jumped the shark’ moment for the contemporary craft renaissance.

Future audiences for Australian stories: industry responses in a post-web 2.0 world

The development of global social networking sites using Web 2.0 technologies (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc.) is signalling a shift in media usage towards an environment in which the distinction between producer and consumer is less clearly defined. While audiences still demand and enjoy a quality professional product, their active personal experience of media production means that they are no longer content to remain outside the production process. This paper outlines the first part of a multi-stage research project that is monitoring responses on both sides of the divide. Through analysis of media coverage, policy reports, submissions to government and interviews with a number of senior executives in leading Australian screen agencies and industry organisations, we have identified four distinct categories of Australian film industry response to technological change and shifts in media consumption, provisionally referred to as ‘Denial’, ‘Panic’, ‘Embrace’ and ‘Co-create’. In this paper, we offer a critical examination of these responses.

Precariously Mobile: Tensions between the Local and the Global in Higher Education Approaches to Cultural Work

As noted by Oakley in a previous chapter, a key issue underpinning the growth of cultural work and creative industries training in higher education (HE) is the surplus of creative workers being produced. As is well established in the writing on cultural work (cf. Hesmondhalgh, 2002), this excess of willing talent has led to even higher barriers to entry for in-demand careers and a concurrent potential for exploitative work practices. Further, much of the rhetoric around cultural work follows that of other ‘sexy’ professions and talks up the need for, and desirability of, a cosmopolitan subjectivity and a physical global mobility as a precondition for gaining access to cultural work. Most famously, this is evident in the work of economist Richard Florida and his writings on the creative class; indeed it is explicit in the title of his 2007 book The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent. This situation is at once exacerbated by the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), which may necessitate a willingness to move further away and/or to places not previously favoured in order to gain employment.

Precarious Labour Then and Now: The British Arts and Crafts Movement and the Ethics of Rural Cultural Work Re-visited

The emotional and pleasurable affordances of creativity and work underpinned that most Victorian of radical politics — the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Self-consciously the inheritor of the Romantic legacy, but much more politically engaged with the labour politics of its time, the Arts and Crafts Movement’s leading figures were motivated into opposition to the status quo by an intense antagonism to the division of labour brought into being by the work practices of the Industrial Revolution with its large factories and piecework. While not all were card-carrying socialists, the thinking around the ideal organisation of working life and community inspired by the best practices of creative work paralleled Marx’s early opposition to ‘alienated labour’. As I have written elsewhere (Luckman, 2012), it also has clear parallels with contemporary cultural work discussions regarding what exactly constitutes ‘good work’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011) in the precarious world of creative employment. However, unlike Marx, the inspiration for the Arts and Crafts Movement’s vision of the good life was firmly historical; they were heavily influenced by medieval guild approaches and looked back to history for their own best practice models of cultural work. Thus, and like the Frankfurt School following it (Banks, 2007, p. 31), the Arts and Crafts Movement championed the necessity of craft-based production systems. The non-urban thus gave rise to what remainsone of the most influential radical movements for good cultural work, a project that continues to the present day as scholars still grapple with the nexus of ‘good work’ and ‘good lives’ (Hesmondhalgh and Baker, 2011, pp. 21–2).