01 February 2017
Professor Susan Luckman of the Hawke EU Centre has been appointed the Visiting Cheney Fellow in the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Cultures at the University of Leeds for 2017-2018. During the Fellowship, Susan will explore how cultural values and social infrastructure can best support creative innovation. The project will bring leading understandings drawn from cultural and creative industries research together with currently more STEM-based policy and practice debates around supporting innovation and design thinking. Given the centrality of self-employment, micro-enterprise and a highly mobile creative workforce within emerging making ecologies, a core focus of the research will be upon what alternative models of collectivity for making, doing and information sharing are best placed to democratise access to sustainable making capacity in the twenty-first century. In this way, drawing upon the resources and networks of the Cultural Institute, School of Media and Communication, and Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science, the project brings fablabs, co-working spaces, women-dominated craft networks, the men’s sheds movement, and artist-run initiatives into dialogue with both one another, as well as past models (such as the Mechanics Institute movement) to empower new ways forward. She will visit for 6 weeks from May 15 to June 30 and August 25 to October 8 in 2017, and a further three months in 2018.
Susan Luckman is Professor: Cultural Studies and Associate Director: Research and Programs of the Hawke EU Centre for Mobilities, Migrations and Cultural Transformations at the University of South Australia. She is an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar whose work is concerned with the intersections of culture, place and creativity.
