Key change: The role of the creative industries in climate change action

The role of the creative industries – arts and artists – in helping to drive the changes in laws and behaviours that are necessary to tackle climate change, while not superficially obvious, is a deep one. Arts and artists of all kinds, as cultural practitioners, have been closely entwined with social change and social control since time immemorial, in large part because they help shape our understanding of the world, framing ideas, prefiguring change, and opening hearts and minds to new ways of thinking. They have played a major role in campaigns for law reform on many issues, and climate change should be no exception. Indeed, with climate change increasingly being seen as a deeply cultural issue, and its solutions as cultural ones to do with changing the way we understand our world and our place in it, the role of cultural practitioners in helping to address it should also increasingly be seen as central. It is curious, then, how comparatively little artistic engagement with climate change has taken place, how little engagement with the arts the climate movement has attempted, and how little theoretical and critical analysis has been undertaken on the role of the creative arts in climate change action. Through a literature review and a series of interviews with individuals working in relevant fields in Australia, this study examines and evaluates the role of the creative industries in climate change action and places it in a historical and theoretical context. It covers examples of the kind of artistic and activist collaborations that have been undertaken, the different roles in communication, campaigning for law reform, and deep culture change that arts and artists can play, and the risks and dangers inherent in the involvement of artists, both to climate change action and to the artist. It concludes that, despite the risks, a deeper and more thoughtful engagement of and by the creative industries in climate action would not only be useful but is perhaps vital to the success of the endeavours.

Reflexivity and self-care for creative facilitators: Stepping outside the circle

Those who work with others to explore new and creative ways of thinking about community and organizational participation, ways of engaging with others, individual well-being and creative solutions to problems, have a significant role in a cohesive society. Creative forms of learning can stimulate reflexive practices of self-care and lead to enhanced relationships and practices both personally and professionally. We argue that those who facilitate such practices for others do not always practice their own self-care, which potentially leads to burnout and disillusionment. This research sought to explore understandings and practices of self-care with such facilitators in order to develop resources or techniques to support more sustainable professional identities. A key finding is that reflexive processes are most effective and transforming when shared as a social practice.

The creative suburb: Building and urban designs for suburban innovators

Influential creative industries and creative place thinkers Richard Florida and Charles Landry agree that creativity is necessary for a prospering liveable and, therefore, sustainable city. Following Florida’s work, the ‘creative class’ has become central to what has turned out to be city-centre-centric growth policies. However, until the Queensland University of Technology’s Australian Research Council sponsored research into “creative suburbia”, few researchers had demonstrated – let alone challenged – the notion that a substantial cohort of creative industries workers might prefer to live and work at home in the suburbs rather than in city centres. The “creative suburb” work builds on the creative suburbia research. In a practice-led and property development industry embedded inquiry, the creative suburb draws on significant primary research with suburban, home-based, creative industries workers, vernacular architecture, and town planning in the Toowoomba region, in the state of Queensland, Australia, as inspiration for a series of new building and urban designs available for innovators operating in new suburban greenfield situations and suburban areas undergoing a refit in Queensland and possibly further afield. This paper focuses on one building design informed by this inquiry, with the intention of its construction as a ’showcasestudy’ ‘homeworkhouse’, suitable for creative industries workers in the Toowoomba region.

The creative suburb: A study in creative reflective practice

As long as population growth continues, policies for urban consolidation closer to city centres fail, and there is land available, Australians will continue to build in new Greenfield suburbs. However, the 50-year legacy of the homogeneous one-size-fits-all approach to suburbia beyond the sticks and sometimes hours away from where one can find a job, is proving unsustainable, the commute alone a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions across the globe. The ‘creative suburb’ was inspired by the possibility to create new, innovative and entrepreneurial suburbs, places which are more self-sufficient and self-contained than the ‘product’ perpetuated down under even today. The ‘creative suburb’ draws on significant primary research with suburban home-based creative industries workers, vernacular architecture, and town planning in the Toowoomba region, in the state of Queensland, Australia, as inspiration for a series of new building and urban designs available for innovators operating in new suburban greenfield situations in Queensland and possibly further a field. This paper considers the role ‘creative reflective practice’ played in the process of developing the building and urban designs presented in a book and showcased in a building as creative outputs of this practice-led and property development industry embedded inquiry.

Participatory media and 'co-creative' storytelling

Distinguishing critical participatory media from other participatory media forms (for example user-generated content and social media) may be increasingly difficult to do, but nonetheless remains an important task if media studies is to remain relevant to the continuing development of inclusive social political and media cultures. This was one of a number of the premises for a national Australian Research Council-funded study that set out to improve the visibility of critical participatory media, and understand its use for facilitating media participation on a population wide basis (Spurgeon et. al. 2015). The term ‘co-creative’ media was adopted to make this distinction and to describe an informal system of critical participatory media practice that is situated between major public, Indigenous and community arts, culture and media sectors. Although the co-creative media system is found to be a site of innovation and engine for social change its value is still not fully understood. For this reason, this system continues to provide media and cultural studies scholars with valuable sites for researching the sociocultural transformations afforded by new media and communication technologies, as well as their limitations.

Mixed reality stories: How creative writers integrate virtual and physical realities

Mixed reality stories (MRS) unfold simultaneously in the physical and the virtual world. Advancements in digital technologies, which are now able to capture more contextual information about our physical environments, are enabling novel ways of blending the two worlds. To explore the process of creating stories from this perspective, we conducted a study with creative writers, in which we asked them to write a MRS script for outdoor running. While we saw instances of intentional connections between physical and virtual worlds in their work, we also observed the use of ambiguity or even deliberate contradiction with available contextual information. In this paper we discuss how these approaches can be beneficial for MRS and propose directions for future work.

Creative Arts in Counselling and Mental Health

Drawing on evidence-based discoveries in neuroscience, narrative psychology and creativity theory, this text explores the beneficial role of expressive arts within a recovery perspective. A framework of practice principles for the visual arts, creative writing, music, drama, dance, and digital storytelling is addressed across a number of settings and populations, providing readers with an accessible overview of theory and techniques relevant to counselling programs in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Creative writing: Literature review and evidence-based research

There is growing evidence, especially in the USA and UK, that creative writing can form an important part of the recovery experience of people affected by severe mental illness. In this chapter, I consider theoretical models that explain how creative writing might contribute to recovery, and discuss the potential for creative writing in psychosocial rehabilitation. It is argued that the rehabilitation benefits of creative writing might be optimized through focus on process and technique in writing, rather than expression or content alone, and that consequently, the involvement of professional writers might be important. I will explore the recent history of theoretical frameworks and explanatory models that link creative writing and recovery, and examine such empirical evidence as is available on the contribution of creative writing to recovery from severe mental illness.

Creative writing: A practice-based account of designing and facilitating life-writing workshops for a group With severe mental illness

This chapter is based on the experience and findings of a pilot project developed to investigate the feasibility of providing a writing workshop for people participating in psychosocial rehabilitation programmes provided by a non-government agency in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was a qualitative study, making use of observational data, interviews with participants, and informal reports. We did not seek to test theoretical models concerning the link between creative writing and recovery through the pilot project, but rather to evaluate the immediate impact of a writing workshop conducted in the manner outlined in the preceding chapter by Philip Neilsen (chapter 7).

The impact of the public library as a creative place in the community: A contextual review

This review examines recent literature on the public library as a creative place and the ways in which socio-cultural impact is being measured in assessments of cultural value. Inputs such as funding and staffing are frequently measured against outputs such as visitor numbers and lending frequencies, but qualitative measures (outcomes and impacts) are minimal in the literature because of the lack of persuasive evaluative frameworks and the difficulty of designing and facilitating the evaluations at local and national levels. Nevertheless, when combined with data about outputs and outcomes, the impact on individuals and their communities can be measured effectively and reported persuasively (Poll 2012, p.124). This contextual review provides an overview of current thinking about public libraries and creative spaces with particular attention paid to the rise of so-called makerspaces and Fab Labs. This includes discussion on the types of creative activities that are occurring in the public library context, and an outline of the rhetoric and reality of the public library as a community space. These outlines are reconsidered in a discussion of the evaluative frameworks that have been employed by libraries in the past, followed by an account of some prominent creative spaces that have been formally evaluated. The existence of creative spaces in public libraries is in a state of constant flux, and the development and redevelopment of evaluative frameworks will ensure that published reports will continue to appear throughout 2015 and beyond. This review provides a brief snapshot of the state of the field as it is in the first quarter of 2015.

Paradigmatic considerations for creative practice in Creative Industries research: The case of Australia's Indie 100

This paper begins with the assertion that research grounded in creative practice constitutes a new paradigm. We argue both for and against the idea. We argue against the idea in terms of applying it to the idealised ‘lone artist’ engaged in the production of their art, whose focus of research is a self-reflection upon the art they produce, and whose art is also the findings of the research. Our position is that such an approach cannot be considered as anything other than a form of auto-phenomenography, that such efforts are part of qualitative research, and they are thus trivial in paradigmatic terms. However, we argue in the positive for understanding the artistic event – by which we mean any mass ecology of artistic practice – as being paradigmatically new in terms of research potentials and demands. Our exemplar for that argument is a practice-led, large-scale annual event called Indie 100 which has run for five years and has demonstrated a distinct paradigmatic ‘settling in’ over its duration while clearly pushing paradigmatic boundaries for research into creative practice.

Long time, no see? (DIY walking)

Building on the launch of an early prototype at Balance Unbalance 2013, we now offer a fully realised experience of the ‘Long Time, No See?’ site specific walking/visualisation project for conference users to engage with on a do it yourself basis, either before, during or after the event. ‘Long Time, No See?’ is a new form of participatory, environmental futures project, designed for individuals and groups. It uses a smartphone APP to guide processes of individual or group walking at any chosen location—encouraging walkers to think in radical new ways about how to best prepare for ‘stormy’ environmental futures ahead. As part of their personal journeys participants’ contribute site-specific micro narratives in the form of texts, images and sounds, captured via the APP during the loosely ‘guided’ walk. These responses are then uploaded and synthesised into an ever-building audiovisual and generative artwork/‘map’ of future-thinking affinities, viewable both online at long-time-no-see.org (in Chrome) (and at the same time on a large screen visualisations at QUT’s Cube Centre in Brisbane Australia). The artwork therefore spans both participants’ mobile devices and laptops. If desired outcomes can also be presented publicly in large screen format at the conference. ‘Long Time, No See?’ has been developed over the past two years by a team of leading Australian artists, designers, urban/environmental planners and programmers.

Swallowing sounds in children: Establishing normative data

Limited data on cervical auscultation (CA) sounds in normal swallows of various food and fluid textures during the transitional feeding period of 4-36 months exists. This study documents the acoustic and perceptual parameters of swallowing sounds in healthy children aged 4–36 months over a range of food and fluid consistencies.

Dancing into the second phase of creative industries

As we enter the second phase of creative industries there is a shift away from the early 1990s ideology of the arts as a creative content provider for the wealth generating ‘knowledge’ economy to an expanded rhetoric encompassing ‘cultural capital’ and its symbolic value. A renewed focus on culture is examined through a regional scan of creative industries in which social engineering of the arts occurs through policy imperatives driven by ‘profit oriented conceptualisations of culture’ (Hornidge 2011, p. 263) In the push for artists to become ‘culturpreneurs’ a trend has emerged where demand for ‘embedded creatives’ (Cunningham 2013) sees an exodus from arts-based employment through use of transferable skills into areas outside the arts. For those that stay, within the performing arts in particular, employment remains project-based, sporadic, underpaid, self-initiated and often self-financed, requiring adaptive career paths. Artist entrepreneurs must balance creation and performance of their art with increasing amounts of time spent on branding, compliance, fundraising and the logistical and commercial requirements of operating in a CI paradigm. The artists’ key challenge thus becomes one of aligning core creative and aesthetic values with market and business considerations. There is also the perceived threat posed by the ‘prosumer’ phenomenon (Bruns 2008), in which digital on-line products are created and produced by those formerly seen as consumers of art or audiences for art. Despite negative aspects to this scenario, a recent study (Steiner & Schneider 2013) reveals that artists are happier and more satisfied than other workers within and outside the creative industries. A lively hybridisation of creative practice is occurring through mobile and interactive technologies with dynamic connections to social media. Continued growth in arts festivals attracts participation in international and transdisciplinary collaborations, whilst cross-sectoral partnerships provide artists with opportunities beyond a socio-cultural setting into business, health, science and education. This is occurring alongside a renewed engagement with place through the rise of cultural precincts in ‘creative cities’ (Florida 2008, Landry 2000), providing revitalised spaces for artists to gather and work. Finally, a reconsideration of the specialist attributes and transferable skills that artists bring to the creative industries suggests ways to dance through both the challenges and opportunities occasioned by the current complexities of arts’ practices.

Creative Labor in Cinema and Media Industries

Introduction The rapidly burgeoning popularity of cinema at the beginning of the 20th century favored industrialized modes of creativity organized around large production studios that could churn out a steady stream of narrative feature films. By the mid-1910s, a handful of Hollywood studios became leaders in the production, distribution, and exhibition of popular commercial movies. In order to serve incessant demand for new titles, the studios relied on a set of conventions that allowed them to regularize production and realize workplace efficiencies. This entailed a socialized mode of creativity that would later be adopted by radio and television broadcasters. It would also become a model for cinema and media production around the world, both for commercial and state-supported institutions. Even today the core tenets of industrialized creativity prevail in most large media enterprises. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, media industries began to change radically, driven by forces of neoliberalism, corporate conglomeration, globalization, and technological innovation. Today, screen media are created both by large-scale production units and by networked ensembles of talent and skilled labor. Moreover, digital media production may take place in small shops or via the collective labor of media users or fans who have attracted attention due to their hyphenated status as both producers and users of media (i.e., “prosumers”). Studies of screen media labor fall into five conceptual and methodological categories: historical studies of labor relations, ethnographically inspired investigations of workplace dynamics, critical analyses of the spatial and social organization of labor, and normative assessments of industrialized creativity.