Abstract: Toward 'Just' Sustainabilities

The predominant orientation of sustainability among high income nations is 'environmental'. The environmental sustainability discourse is dominant in environmental organizations, businesses and in governments. This discourse is exclusive rather than inclusive and focuses only on inter-generational, not intra-generational equity, or social justice in the present generation. It perpetuates what I call the 'equity deficit' of environmental sustainability. My paper will focus on 'just sustainability'; improving the quality of human life now, and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, while living within the limits of supporting ecosystems. 'Just' sustainability balances environmental protection with an equal commitment to social justice, thereby overcoming the 'equity deficit' of the current orientation and discourse of sustainability.

Bio

Julian Agyeman is Associate Professor, and Chair of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University, Boston-Medford.His research interests include the nexus between environmental justice and sustainability, rural racism in Britain and education for sustainability. He is co-founder, and co-editor of the international journal 'Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability'. With over 130 publications, his books include 'Local Environmental Policies and Strategies' (Longman 1994), Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World' (MIT Press 2003), 'Sustainable Communities and the Challenge of Environmental Justice' (NYU Press 2005) and 'The New Countryside? Ethnicity, Nation and Exclusion in Contemporary Rural Britain (The Policy Press 2006).He is a Fellow of the UK Royal Society of the Arts (FRSA), a member of the Board of the Center for Whole Communities and is on the Editorial Boards of Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development, Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture, Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, The Journal of Environmental Education, and the Australian Journal of Environmental Education.

Culture and Habit

References to habit are more or less ubiquitous in modern social and cultural theory, sometimes as a ‘virtue’, as in the case of the habits instilled by discipline, but more usually as a problem, as an impediment and blockage to the dynamics of change. References to habit play this role in the formulations of the ‘classical period’ of sociology as well as in the later literature on the sociology of everyday life where, particularly when inflected by gendered discourses, women embody the habitual repetitions of the everyday which the dynamics of modernity must periodically overthrow. They play a similar role in accounts of the role of avant-gardes in renovating modern culture by challenging habituated modes of perception, with the audiences of popular media often being seen as embodying the inertia, the habitual forms of inattentiveness, that avant-gardes must pit themselves against. They are similarly invoked in accounts of the specificity of the aesthetic, from eighteenth-century civic humanism through to Foucault’s ‘aesthetics of existence’. And they play a key role in the discourses of colonialism, particularly when reinterpreted under the influence of evolutionary thought, in explaining why some societies – once in the forefront of humanity’s advancement – get stuck in the rut and why others, those designated as ‘primitive’, never got started at all. In ranging across these uses of habit, this lecture will review the role played by the Kantian conception of culture as a process of free and undirected self-formation in providing the standard of personhood against which habit has increasingly come to be defined; it will also review some the difficulties that this presents.

Tony Bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, a Director of the Economic and Social Science Research Centre on Socio-Cultural Change, and a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His publications include Formalism and Marxism; Outside Literature; Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (with Janet Woollacott); The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics; Culture: A Reformer’s Science; Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures (with Michael Emmison and John Frow); and, most recently, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism and New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (edited with Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris).

Bio

Angi Buettner has received her PhD in Cultural Studies from The University of Queensland, and teaches Media Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Angi researches in the areas of new media, cultural studies, environmental studies, and cross-disciplinary work between media studies and environmental studies. Her research focuses on communication, the interaction between media and environmental institutions, the media processes that sustain environmental debate, and the influence of ecological debates on the development of the media and media theory. She teaches undergraduate students in courses on media literacies, new media, and media and the environment, as well as graduate students in media theory and research methods. Angi also has a long record of working in the new media and communications sector and has produced consultant reports for industry.

Bio

Barbara Comber is a key researcher in the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures and Acting Director of the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies at the University of South Australia. Her particular interests include literacy education and social justice, teachers’ work and identities, place and space, and practitioner inquiry. She has worked on a number of longitudinal collaborative research projects with teachers in high poverty locations focussing on innovative and critical pedagogies which address contemporary social challenges.

Director
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology
On the residual, the dominant and the emergent in the cultural economy

While no economist, and not especially interested in the question of the relation between culture and economy, Raymond Williams made a powerful contribution to its understanding by offering a basic typology of culture in his foundational text Culture (1981) as residual, dominant or emergent. This is a simple but powerful typology which emphasizes the dynamic, overlapping and contested nature of culture and its role in economies globally and the global economy.

We can hypothesize four possible models of the relation of culture to the economy: (1) negative, (2) competitive, (3) positive and (4) emergent. These roughly map onto Williams’ residual = (1), dominant = (2) and emergent crossing over (3) and (4).

This address will exposit this schematic as both a history of approaches to culture and the economy, and an outline of theories which may adequately account for emergent culture.

Bio

Stuart Cunningham is Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation based at Queensland University of Technology. He is President of national advocacy body CHASS (Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences) and is completing a term as Chair of the Humanities and Creative Arts panel of the ARC’s College of Experts.

His books include Featuring Australia (1991), Framing Culture (1992), and (written or edited with John Sinclair and Elizabeth Jacka) New Patterns in Global Television (1996), Australian Television and International Mediascapes (1996), and Floating Lives: The Media and Asian Diasporas (2001). He edits (with Graeme Turner) the standard tertiary media studies text, The Media and Communications in Australia (4th edition, 2006). Recent work includes What Price a Creative Economy? (2006). A collection of his key essays is forthcoming in 2008.

Bio

Dr Catherine Driscoll is Chair of Gender and Cultural Studies at Sydney. She has worked at the Universities of Melbourne and Adelaide before joining the Department in 2003 – she teaches undergraduate students in Youth Cultures: Images and Ideas of Youth and Cultural Theory and postgraduate students in Modernism, Modernity and Modern Culture.

Catherine writes in a range of fields, including modernism, cultural theory, philosophy, fan cultures, online culture, youth studies, girl culture and rural studies. Her forthcoming publications include Modernist Cultural Studies (University Press of Florida) and Broadcast Yourself: Intimacy, Presence and Community Online (with Dr Melissa Gregg). Her other current research projects focus on consent, on new romance genres, and on Australian country girlhood (based on an ARC-funded discovery project). She is also a member of the ARC's Cultural Research Network.

Bio

Gay Hawkins is an Associate Professor in the School of English, Media and Performing Arts at UNSW. She researches in the areas of poststructuralist ethics and materiality; biopolitics and naturecultures; and the role of publics and publicity in framing nature. In 2006 she published The Ethics of Waste and in 2002 co-edited with Stephen Muecke Culture and Waste: the creation and destruction of value. She is currently researching the social and material life of bottled water, with a particular emphasis on how water is implicated in regimes of living. This project is investigating how subjects are mobilised to consume bottled water; what conducts surround its everyday consumption and disposal; and the relations between plastic, portability, and disposability. It will also track the place of bottled water in the ‘will to health’ and how material cultures of bottled water consumption intersect with political cultures of the tap and its role in population health and governance.

Bio

Chris Healy teaches cultural studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include: Beasts of Suburbia (co-ed., 1994), From the Ruins of Colonialism (1997), Cultural Studies Review (co-ed. 2002-6), South Pacific Museums (co-ed., 2006) and Forgetting Aborigines (forthcoming 2008).

Unsettling sustainability: Ngarrindjeri political literacies, strategies of engagement and transformation

Indigenous peoples internationally have been engaged in a long-term struggle to sustain their ‘cultures’ in the face of the rapid colonization of their lands, waters, economies and intellectual traditions. In this context the concept of culture has often been used by the colonizers in a conservative way distancing Indigenous people from contemporary forms of power. In August 2007 the Ngarrindjeri Nation signed their first treaty with ten other Indigenous nations from the USA, Canada and New Zealand. In doing so the United League of Indigenous Nations (ULIN) was formed to establish an independent forum for Indigenous Nations to ‘secure, recover and promote, through political, social, cultural and economic unity, the rights of all our peoples…’ (ULIN 2007: 2).

The signing of the ULIN treaty represents a significant strategic shift in Ngarrindjeri efforts to secure a healthy future on Ngarrindjeri Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea Country). Engaging with other Indigenous Nations nationally and internationally unsettles non-Indigenous concepts of sustainability which tend to subsume Indigenous interests in localizing, environmentalist and Aboriginalist discourses.

Daryle Rigney and Steve Hemming as academics and advisors to the Ngarrindjeri Nation leadership have been engaging with Indigenous theorizations of power, development and sustainability that emerge from Indigenous experiences of colonization in English-speaking Pacific Rim countries. In particular, this has involved de-centring the coloniser through a process of conscientisation and transformative practice which privileges Indigenous interests and asserts Indigenous decision-making power. Indigenous governance, economic development and what might be described as cultural sustainability become critical sites in this process.

In South Australia the Ngarrindjeri Nation, located at the mouth of Australia’s iconic River Murray, has witnessed a number of forms of colonization of its Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea Country). This has included the alienation of lands and waters to make way for non-Indigenous pastoralism, agriculture, irrigation and township development. The Lower Murray region is internationally recognized for its environmental significance and is severely degraded due to the impacts of poor agricultural practices, the overuse of water and global warming. State and federal responses have funded a boom in natural resources management and environmental research designed to achieve what is described as a more sustainable relationship with this Murray Darling Basin. This form of sustainability largely excludes Indigenous interests and a key challenge for the Ngarrindjeri leadership is to develop the political literacy required to strategize engagements that transform existing power relations and subsequent flows of resources. This paper will use these Ngarrindjeri experiences as a case study in a consideration of the relationship between governance, economic development, sustaining ‘culture’ and Indigenous wellbeing.

Bio

Steve Hemming is a senior lecturer in Australian Studies at Flinders University. He also teaches into the Indigenous Studies program run by Yunggorendi First Nations Centre (Flinders University). During the 1980s and 1990s he was a curator in history and anthropology at the South Australian Museum. He has had a long-term, collaborative research relationship with the Ngarrindjeri Nation and more recently this has included a focus on the nexus between cultural heritage management, natural resource management, economic development and governance. He is interested in the development of strategic teaching and research partnerships between industry, the university sector and Indigenous Nations. His most recent publications include collaborative pieces, ‘Reconciliation? Culture, Nature and the River Murray’ and ‘Justice, Culture and Economy for the Ngarrindjeri Nation’ in Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia (2007).

Since moving to Flinders University Steve has worked on a number of research projects and Indigenous community programs with Associate Professor Daryle Rigney. This has included the development of international partnerships with First Nations in the USA, Canada and New Zealand. At a national level this has involved a collaborative research project with Charles Sturt University and the Ngarrindjeri Nation (CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country, Flagship Project) focusing on the economic and cultural value of water to Ngarrindjeri people.

Sustainability: continuity, transformation and possibility.

This paper tries to address the general problem of sustainability by looking at the biographies of cultural products in the global culture industry. It looks at the movements of a range of cultural products – from Wallace and Gromit to Nike - across national borders and transnational media, and asks what stays the same, what changes? And it considers whether and how sameness and change need to be thought to enable sustainability. Conversely, it asks whether and how sustainability should or could be the goal of culture.

Celia Lury is Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research is focused on gender and culture, and the relations between them. She has long-standings interests in the culture industry (Global Culture Industry: The Mediation of Things, with Scott Lash, Polity, 2007), and has written widely on advertising and branding, including the book Brands: The Logos of the Global Economy (Routledge). She is currently the director of an EU research network, ‘A Topological Approach to Cultural Dynamism’.

Bio

Stephen Muecke is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney. He has worked extensively in Indigenous Australia and more recently on the historical and contemporary links between culture and commerce in the Indian Ocean. Recent books are Ancient & Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (UNSW Press 2004) and (with Devleena Ghosh, eds.) Cultures of Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges, 2007.

Bio

Dr Helen Nixon is Associate Professor of Education and Deputy Director of the Centre for Studies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures in the Hawke Research Institute at the University of South Australia. Her research interests include the challenges posed to literacy education by the widespread take-up of new media and the changing landscape of communication. With colleagues she has undertaken several large, school-based research projects into literacy and disadvantage. She is currently working on three Australian Research Council funded projects: changing middle schooling curriculum and pedagogy in challenging social settings; literacy and the environment; and parents’ information networks about young children’s learning and development.

Bio

Dr Emily Potter is an ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne. Her current project focuses on creative research and the poetic remaking of environments. She is the co-editor of Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia (MUP, 2007).

Unsettling sustainability: Ngarrindjeri political literacies, strategies of engagement and transformation

Indigenous peoples internationally have been engaged in a long-term struggle to sustain their ‘cultures’ in the face of the rapid colonization of their lands, waters, economies and intellectual traditions. In this context the concept of culture has often been used by the colonizers in a conservative way distancing Indigenous people from contemporary forms of power. In August 2007 the Ngarrindjeri Nation signed their first treaty with ten other Indigenous nations from the USA, Canada and New Zealand. In doing so the United League of Indigenous Nations (ULIN) was formed to establish an independent forum for Indigenous Nations to ‘secure, recover and promote, through political, social, cultural and economic unity, the rights of all our peoples…’ (ULIN 2007: 2).

The signing of the ULIN treaty represents a significant strategic shift in Ngarrindjeri efforts to secure a healthy future on Ngarrindjeri Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea Country). Engaging with other Indigenous Nations nationally and internationally unsettles non-Indigenous concepts of sustainability which tend to subsume Indigenous interests in localizing, environmentalist and Aboriginalist discourses.

Daryle Rigney and Steve Hemming as academics and advisors to the Ngarrindjeri Nation leadership have been engaging with Indigenous theorizations of power, development and sustainability that emerge from Indigenous experiences of colonization in English-speaking Pacific Rim countries. In particular, this has involved de-centring the coloniser through a process of conscientisation and transformative practice which privileges Indigenous interests and asserts Indigenous decision-making power. Indigenous governance, economic development and what might be described as cultural sustainability become critical sites in this process.

In South Australia the Ngarrindjeri Nation, located at the mouth of Australia’s iconic River Murray, has witnessed a number of forms of colonization of its Yarluwar-Ruwe (Sea Country). This has included the alienation of lands and waters to make way for non-Indigenous pastoralism, agriculture, irrigation and township development. The Lower Murray region is internationally recognized for its environmental significance and is severely degraded due to the impacts of poor agricultural practices, the overuse of water and global warming. State and federal responses have funded a boom in natural resources management and environmental research designed to achieve what is described as a more sustainable relationship with this Murray Darling Basin. This form of sustainability largely excludes Indigenous interests and a key challenge for the Ngarrindjeri leadership is to develop the political literacy required to strategize engagements that transform existing power relations and subsequent flows of resources. This paper will use these Ngarrindjeri experiences as a case study in a consideration of the relationship between governance, economic development, sustaining ‘culture’ and Indigenous wellbeing.

Bio

Daryle Rigney is an Associate Professor of Education/Indigenous Studies and former Director of Yunggorendi, First Nations Centre for Higher Education and Research, Flinders University, Adelaide. As an Indigenous academic and advisor to the Ngarrindjeri Nation, South Australia he has been principally responsible for developing relationships internationally with Indigenous nations including a resolution to establish social, cultural, economic and scholarly exchange with the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Oregon, USA. Daryle recently represented the Ngarrindjeri Nation at the signing of the United League of Indigenous Nations (ULIN) and was a co-chair of the Interim Governing Board of the United League of Indigenous Nations.

Creative Subject(s): reflections of the history of Media Studies

This talk reflects on the wider role of Media Studies as a subject/discipline in relation to tensions within the school curriculum and the changing nature of the citizen consumer. It especially examines how Media Studies graduates along with other Creative Arts disciplines have played a part in maintaining a creative workforce - whose defining abilities maybe one of compliant 'precarious' labour rather than the claims made for economic productivity and growth. It examines 3 histories of the subject. It first looks at early Media Studies as the product of an activist teacher-workforce concerned with making an offer for independent students and racially exploring questions of content and pedagogy - a mode of operations that has become reinvigorated by Web.2 technologies. This approach received formal (if contradictory) mandate by societies concerned with the effects of mass media and current attempts to define media literacy as a form of self--regulation in concert with the current educational-isation of media culture. Finally the talk will consider the paradox of how media studies works along with other creative industries subjects to produce forms of precarious labour -the defining feature of the creative workforce- and to increase consumer demand. Final directions reflect of the politics of this 'incorporation'.This talk reflects on the wider role of Media Studies as a subject/discipline in relation to tensions within the school curriculum and the changing nature of the citizen consumer. It especially examines how Media Studies graduates along with other Creative Arts disciplines have played a part in maintaining a creative workforce - whose defining abilities maybe one of compliant 'precarious' labour rather than the claims made for economic productivity and growth. It examines 3 histories of the subject. It first looks at early Media Studies as the product of an activist teacher-workforce concerned with making an offer for independent students and racially exploring questions of content and pedagogy - a mode of operations that has become reinvigorated by Web.2 technologies. This approach received formal (if contradictory) mandate by societies concerned with the effects of mass media and current attempts to define media literacy as a form of self--regulation in concert with the current educational-isation of media culture. Finally the talk will consider the paradox of how media studies works along with other creative industries subjects to produce forms of precarious labour -the defining feature of the creative workforce- and to increase consumer demand. Final directions reflect of the politics of this 'incorporation'.

Bio

Dr. Julian Sefton-Green an independent consultant and researcher working in Education and the Cultural and Creative Industries. He is currently an Adjunct Associate Research Professor at the University of South Australia, where has been developing a city-wide initiative to develop new kinds of spaces for learning. He is also working with the University of Oslo supporting research exploring learning across formal and informal domains and currently carrying out research into the creative workforce in London. He has been the Head of Media Arts and Education at WAC Performing Arts and Media College - a centre for informal training and education - where he directed a range of digital media activities for young people and co-ordinated training for media artists and teachers. He worked as Media Studies teacher in an inner city comprehensive and in higher education teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses, leading teacher training degree in media education. He has researched and written widely on many aspects of media education, new technologies and informal learning, including Cultural Studies Goes to School (with David Buckingham) (Taylor and Francis 1994), Digital Diversions (UCL Press 1998), Creativity, Young People and New Technologies (Routledge 1999) and Evaluating Creativity: Making and Learning by Young People (Routledge 2000). He has directed research projects for the Arts Council of England, the British Film Institute and Creative Partnerships and has spoken at a number of conferences around the world. www.julianseftongreen.net

Bio

Dr Mandy Treagus' research interests are divergent in topic, but coalesce around an interest in the construction of identities, with particular emphasis on nation, gender, colonial relations, sexuality, the body and the gaze. She has published on popular culture, in particular film, television and music, in both academic and popular journals. Her interest in Victorian culture has resulted in publications on colonial literature and on the emergence of women's sport. The article, 'The Body of the Imperial Mother: Women, Exercise and the Future of 'the Race' in Britain, 1870-1914', published in the postcolonial journal Kunapipi, examines the resistance to women doing strenuous exercise in the light of eugenics and associated rhetoric about motherhood and the welfare of the empire. Postcolonial and multicultural identities are addressed in articles on Samoan author Sia Figiel and Australian Christos Tsiolkas. Her PhD thesis was on colonial women's Bildungsromane. Current research is concerned with colonial exhibitions of Pacific peoples, with initial findings on Maori tours published in the collection Exploring the British World. Mandy is a Review Board Member of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.

Bio

Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies. He is one of the key figures in the development of cultural and media studies in Australia and has an outstanding international reputation in the field. His work is used in many disciplines—cultural and media studies, communications, history, literary studies, and film and television studies—and it has been translated into seven languages. Graeme's research interests are largely in Australian media and popular culture, and his current research project is an ARC-funded study of talkback radio.

Graeme’s most recent publications are Ending the Affair: the decline of television current affairs in Australia (UNSW Press, 2005), and (with Stuart Cunningham) the second edition of The Media and Communications in Australia (Allen & Unwin). Other recent publications include Understanding Celebrity Sage, 2004) and The Film Cultures Reader (Routledge, 2002). Forthcoming articles in Media International Australia and The International Journal of Cultural Studies deal respectively with talkback radio and with the 'demotic turn' in reality TV and celebrity culture.

Bio

Dr Zoë Sofoulis is a researcher at the Centre for Cultural Research and lectures in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Sydney. She has published many articles exploring her longstanding interests in the intersections of culture, technology, gender and irrationality, and has more recently pursued applied cultural research in collaborative projects on driving cultures and road safety, and urban domestic water use.