Designing cultural probes for children

This paper reports on the challenges faced during the design and deployment of educationally-focused cultural probes with children. The aim of the project was to use cultural probes to discover insights into children's interests and ideas within an educational context. The deployment of a cultural probe pack with children aged between 11 and 13 has demonstrated the method's effectiveness as a tool for design inspiration. Children's responses to the cultural probe have provided a valuable insight into the attributes of successful probe activities, the nature of contextual information which may be gathered and the limitations of the method.

Double standards in cultural judgements

The author, a teacher of television and film from a cultural studies perspective, endeavours to persuade his students to give up snobbery when they judge culture. The author has found that most students enter university with a series of middle class value judgements very strongly in place. Essentially, the judgements are that commercial culture is 'bad' and non-commercial culture is 'good'.

Indigenous Australians and Islam : spiritual, cultural, and political alliances

This thesis examines why and how Indigenous Australians convert to Islam in the New South Wales suburbs of Redfern and Lakemba. It is argued that conventional religious conversion theories inadequately account for religious change in the circumstances outlined in this study. The aim of the thesis is to apply a sociological-historical methodology to document and analyse both Indigenous and Islamic pathways eventuating in Indigenous Islamic alliances. All of the Indigenous men interviewed for this research have had contact with Islam either while incarcerated or involved with the criminal justice system. The consequences of these alliances for the Indigenous men constitute the contribution the study makes to new knowledge. The study employs a socio-historical and sociological focus to account for the underlying issues by a literature review followed by an ethnographic participant observation methodology. In-depth open-ended interviews with key informants provided the rich qualitative data to compliment literature review findings. For the Indigenous people involved in this study, Islamic religious identity combined with resistance politics formed a significant empowering framework. For them it is a symbolic representation of anti-colonialism and the enduring scourge of social dysfunction in some Indigenous communities.

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.

Youth theatre and the articulation of cultural capital : refocusing Bourdieu through ethnography

This study of working-class and middle-class youth theatre workshops examines the processes through which this cultural form is appropriated by different class groups. Whereas the middle-class workshop proceeded efficiently and harmoniously, the working-class group resisted a number of institutional constraints traditionally associated with play rehearsal and performance. The processes of such symbolic struggle in the working-class group appeared to differ from Bourdieu's account of cultural domination. The article explores the explanatory contribution of the ethnographic case study to the analysis of the class basis of cultural tastes and practices and suggest that Bourdieu's account of class relations would gain from inclusion of this level of analysis. The situated study of the youth theatre workshops suggests that at this level, there is possibly more scope for symbolic struggle between the classes than was found by Bourdieu.

Re-Presenting/Representing Melbourne: A literary and cultural analysis of Melbourne’s inner city and outer suburbs in contemporary fiction

This article provides an overview of a research project investigating contemporary literary representations of Melbourne’s inner and outer suburban spaces. It will argue that the city represented by local writers is an often more complex way of envisioning the city than the one presented in public policy and cultural discourses. In this view, the writer’s vision of a city does not necessarily override or provide a “truer’ account but it is in the fictional city where the complexity of the everyday life of a city is most accurately portrayed. The article will also provide an overview of the theoretical framework for reading the fictional texts in this way, examining how Soja’s concept of Thirdspace (2006) provides a place to engage “critically with theoretical issues, while simultaneously being that space where the debate occurs” (Mole 2008: 3).

Hall-petch relationship and strain rate sensitivity of nanocrystalline Mg - 5wt% A1 alloy

This study investigated the grain size dependence of mechanical properties and deformation mechanisms of microcrystalline (mc) and nanocrystalline (nc: grain size below 100 nm) Mg-5wt% Al alloys. The Hall-Petch relationship was investigated by both instrumented indentation tests and compression tests. The test results from the indentation tests and compression tests match well with each other. The breakdown of Hall-Petch relationship and the elevated strain rate sensitivity (SRS) of present Mg-5wt% Al alloys when the grain size was reduced below 58nm indicated the more significant role of GB mediated mechanisms in plastic deformation process. However, the relatively smaller SRS values compared to GB sliding and coble creep process suggested the plastic deformation in the current study is still dislocation mediated mechanism dominant.

The cultural and creative industries

A critical and Historical account of the cultural and creative industries as a policy discourse. It argues that the emergence of a cultural policy discourse was part of a progressive democratic politics from the 1960s onwards, taking cognizance of the emergence of new kinds of commercial popular culture. It suggests that this period saw the merging of aesthetics and culture in particular ways. The creative industries come from a different source which combined innovation theory, embedded economics and entrepreneurialism in ways that resulted in a much less progressive politics. The chapter ends by suggesting the the idea of the creative industries is now at an end.

The cultural and creative industries : a literature review [2nd ed.]

This is a short book which gives an introduction and overview of the literature on the cultural and creative industries. This is a revised version of the 2007 edition, with a new conclusion.

Cities, culture and “Transitional Economies”: Developing cultural industries in St Petersburg

In this chapter I look at some issues around the transfer of cultural industry policy between two very different national contexts, the UK and Russia. Specifically it draws on a partnership project between Manchester and St. Petersburg financed by the European Union as part of a program to promote economic development through knowledge transfer between Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union. This specific project attempted to place the cultural industries squarely within the dimension of economic development, and drew on the expertise of Manchester’s Creative Industries Development Service and other partners to effect this policy transfer

The cultural production sector in Manchester

A quantitative and qualitative review of the cultural industries in Manchester at the end of the 1990s