Changing lanes : an exploration of the journey from dance through choreography to directing and the spoken word

This paper reveals a journey of theatrical exploration. It is a journey of enquiry and investigation backed by a vigorous, direct and dense professional history of creative work.

Reconciling the supply of and demand for carbon cycle science in the US agricultural sector

When asking the question, ``How can institutions design science policies for the benefit of decision makers?'' Sarewitz and Pielke Sarewitz, D., Pielke Jr., R.A., this issue. The neglected heart of science policy: reconciling supply of and demand for science. Environ. Sci. Policy 10] posit the idea of ``reconciling supply and demand of science'' as a conceptual tool for assessment of science programs. We apply the concept to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) carbon cycle science program. By evaluating the information needs of decision makers, or the ``demand'', along with the supply of information by the USDA, we can ascertain where matches between supply and demand exist, and where science policies might miss opportunities. We report the results of contextual mapping and of interviews with scientists at the USDA to evaluate the production and use of current agricultural global change research, which has the stated goal of providing ``optimal benefit'' to decision makers on all levels. We conclude that the USDA possesses formal and informal mechanisms by which scientists evaluate the needs of users, ranging from individual producers to Congress and the President. National-level demands for carbon cycle science evolve as national and international policies are explored. Current carbon cycle science is largely derived from those discussions and thus anticipates the information needs of producers. However, without firm agricultural carbon policies, such information is currently unimportant to producers. (C) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Don't sell social science short

The News of the Week article that reports on Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) questioning the need to fund social science research at the National Science Foundation is alarming and shortsighted ("Senate panel chair asks why NSF funds social sciences," 12 May, p. 829). Social science research is at the fundamental core of basic research and has much to contribute to the economic viability of the United States. Twenty years of direct and jointly funded social and ecosystem science research at Colorado State University's Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory has produced deep insights into environmental and societal impacts of political upheaval, land use, and climate change in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Beyond greatly advancing our understanding of the coupled human-environmental system, the partnership of social and ecosystem science has brought scientists and decision-makers together to begin to develop solutions to difficult problems.

Knowledge infrastructure : managing the assets of creative urban regions

Urban infrastructure along the hard forms such as roads, electricity, water and sewers also includes the soft forms such as research, training, innovation and technology. Knowledge and creativity are keys to soft infrastructure and socioeconomic development. Many city administrations around the world adjust their endogenous development strategies increasingly by investing in soft infrastructure and aiming for a knowledge-based development. At this point, the mapping and management of knowledge asset of cities has become a critical issue for promoting creative urban regions. The chapter scrutinizes the relations between knowledge assets and urban infrastructures and examines the management model to improve soft infrastructure provision.

Cultural Science and Methodological Challenge!

The processes of digitization and deregulation have transformed the production, distribution and consumption of information and entertainment media over the past three decades. Today, researchers are confronted with profoundly different landscapes of domestic and personal media than the pioneers of qualitative audience research that came to form much of the conceptual basis of Cultural Studies first in Britain and North America and subsequently across all global regions. The process of media convergence, as a consequence of the dual forces of digitisation and deregulation, thus constitutes a central concept in the analysis of popular mass media. From the study of the internationalisation and globalisation of media content, changing regimes of media production, via the social shaping and communication technologies and conversely the impact of communication technology on social, cultural and political realities, to the emergence of transmedia storytelling, the interplay of intertextuality and genre and the formation of mediated social networks, convergence informs and shapes contemporary conceptual debates in the field of popular communication and beyond. However, media convergence challenges not only the conceptual canon of (popular) communication research, but poses profound methodological challenges. As boundaries between producers and consumers are increasingly fluent, formerly stable fields and categories of research such as industries, texts and audiences intersect and overlap, requiring combined and new research strategies. This preconference aims to offer a forum to present and discuss methodological innovations in the study of contemporary media and the analysis of the social, cultural,and political impact and challenges arising through media convergence. The preconference thus aims to focus on the following methodological questions and challenges: *New strategies of audience research responding to the increasing individualisation of popular media consumption. *Methods of data triangulation in and through the integrated study of media production, distribution and consumption. *Bridging the methodological and often associated conceptual gap between qualitative and quantitative research in the study of popular media. *The future of ethnographic audience and production research in light of blurring boundaries between media producers and consumers. *A critical re-examination of which textual configurations can be meaningfully described and studied as text. *Methodological innovations aimed at assessing the macro social, cultural and political impact of mediatization (including, but not limited to, "creative methods"). *Methodological responses to the globalisation of popular media and practicalities of international and transnational comparative research. *An exploration of new methods required in the study of media flow and intertextuality.

Spatial science news from the School of Urban Development, QUT April, 2010

EDM calibration/comparison at Coombabah,Gold Coast; Survey Staffer wins Vice-Chancellor’s Performance Fund Award; Focus on Surveying Service Teaching; Flexible Spatial Science Minor units; Reminder: Staff and Laboratories moving end of April.

Spatial science news from QUT : industry report : JULY 2010

Real-World Survey practical at Coombabah with GPS surveying; BEE student prizes Evening; Engaging Students in real-world learning at SERF.

From reader to writer : citizen journalism as news produsage

Today, participatory or citizen journalism – journalism which enables readers to become writers – exists online and offline in a variety of forms and formats, operates under a number of editorial schemes, and focusses on a wide range of topics from the specialist to the generic, and the micro-local to the global. Key models in this phenomenon include veteran sites Slashdot and Indymedia, as well as news-related Weblogs; more recent additions into the mix have been the South Korean OhmyNews, which in 2003 was “the most influential online news site in that country, attracting an estimated 2 million readers a day” (Gillmor, 2003a, p. 7), with its new Japanese and international offshoots, as well as the Wikipedia with its highly up-to-date news and current events section and its more recent offshoot Wikinews, and even citizen-produced video news as it is found in sites such as YouTube and Current.tv.

Studying creative industries?

The ‘creative industries’ idea does not belong to anyone, and its orphan status in the disciplinary family has been one of its continuing problems. No existing science developed a theory that could then be tested, using formal hypotheses, experiments, fieldwork, data-analysis and the like.

Resilient creative economies? Creative industries on the urban fringe

The relationship between culture and the economy is of growing interest to researchers, writers and policy makers. Advanced economies have become increasingly ‘culturalised’, pushing culture from the periphery to the centre of policy concerns and action. The economic downturn commencing in late 2008 generated predictions that ranged from the apocalyptic to the sanguine, across all sectors. This article offers an insight into the relationship between the economy, the creative industries and their geographic localities. It investigates creative industries situated away from the urban core, and located in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and Brisbane. We suggest that for creative industries situated in outer suburbs, there are characteristics that may contribute to their economic resilience.

Paradigm shifters : tricksters and cultural science

This paper seeks to link anthropological and economic treatments of the process of innovation and change, not only within a given ‘complex system’ (e.g. a cosmology; an industry) but also between systems (e.g. cultural and economic systems; but also divine and human systems). The role of the ‘Go-Between’ is considered, both in the anthropological figure of the Trickster (Hyde 1998) and in the Schumpeterian entrepreneur. Both figures parlay appetite (economic wants) into meaning (cultural signs). Both practice a form of creativity based on deception, ‘creative destruction’; renewal by disruption and needs-must adaptation. The disciplinary purpose of the paper is to try to bridge two otherwise disconnected domains – cultural studies and evolutionary economics – by showing that the traditional methods of the humanities (e.g. anthropological, textual and historical analysis) have explanatory force in the context of economic actions and complex-system evolutionary dynamics. The objective is to understand creative innovation as a general cultural attribute rather than one restricted only to accredited experts such as artists; thus to theorise creativity as a form of emergence for dynamic adaptive systems. In this context, change is led by ‘paradigm shifters’ – tricksters and entrepreneurs who create new meanings out of the clash of difference, including the clash of mutually untranslatable communication systems (language, media, culture).

Review of regulatory framework for environmental information

If Australian scientists are to fully and actively participate in international scientific collaborations utilising online technologies, policies and laws must support the data access and reuse objectives of these projects. To date Australia lacks a comprehensive policy and regulatory framework for environmental information and data generally. Instead there exists a series of unconnected Acts that adopt historically-based, sector-specific approaches to the collection, use and reuse of environmental information. This paper sets out the findings of an analysis of a representative sample of Australian statutes relating to environmental management and protection to determine the extent to which they meet best practice criteria for access to and reuse of environmental information established in international initiatives. It identifies issues that need to be addressed in the legislation governing environmental information to ensure that Australian scientists are able to fully engage in international research collaborations.

Generalising across borders : policy and the limits of educational science.

AERA Distinguished Lecture, Annual Meetings of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, 8 April 2011. How well does educational policy, innovation and science cross borders? What are the parameters of a generalisable cultural science of education? What constitutes a principled policy 'borrowing'?

Local and global : cultural globalization, consumerism, and children's fiction

According to Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity (2000), the formerly solid and stable institutions of social life that characterised earlier stages of modernity have become fluid. He sees this as an outcome of the modernist project of progress itself, which in seeking to dismantle oppressive structures failed to reconstruct new roles for society, community and the individual. The un-tethering of social life from tradition in the latter stages of the twentieth century has produced unprecedented freedoms and unparalleled uncertainties, at least in the West. Although Bauman’s elaboration of some of the features and drivers of liquid modernity – increased mobility, rapid communications technologies, individualism – suggests it to be a neologism for globalisation, it is arguably also the context which has allowed this phenomenon to flourish. The qualities of fluidity, leakage, and flow that distinguish uncontained liquids also characterise globalisation, which encompasses a range of global trends and processes no longer confined to, or controlled by, the ‘container’ of the nation or state. The concept of liquid modernity helps to explain the conditions under which globalisation discourses have found a purchase and, by extension, the world in which contemporary children’s literature, media, and culture are produced. Perhaps more significantly, it points to the fluid conceptions of self and other that inform the ‘liquid’ worldview of the current generation of consumers of texts for children and young adults. This generation is growing up under the phase of globalisation we describe in this chapter.