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Dear friend and colleague,

Myself and a number of other colleagues are hoping to develop a fully-fledged national research association for those researching in the field of cultural policy in Australia and in order to get started, we are calling on researchers across Australia to sign up to a mailing list: https://mailchi.mp/d8ed41b1b9c0/sign-up

Currently this kind of association exists in other countries, but it is lacking in Australia. Such associations and active research centres have existed in the past, and have had significant global impact, but for over a decade there has been an absence of any focus for researchers in this field. This might reflect the marginalisation of cultural policy within Australia, or it might relate to the fragmentation of the field into different areas of concern. The rapid growth of digital media studies, consequence of “Internet 2.0”, the rise of platform society, and now the explosion of AI, might explain some of this, just as cultural studies has also moved further away from that proximity to cultural policy studies it once enjoyed.

Whatever the reason, we feel there is a need to reassemble research from across the disciplines of media and cultural studies, arts management, cultural and creative industries, digital humanities, artificial intelligence, creative labour studies, journalism and many more, into a space of collective conversation. The marginalisation of cultural policy in Australia does not mean that the concerns of these various disciplines are themselves marginal. Indeed, these are pressing concerns interconnected with the multiple threats to the project of Australian democracy. We feel that it is the moment to re-assemble those researching in this area, to strengthen the field of study, give it greater visibility, create a more collective ethos and maybe provide a platform for new research agendas to emerge.

We are now calling on researchers across Australia to sign up to the Australian Cultural Policy Research Association mailing list at https://mailchi.mp/d8ed41b1b9c0/sign-up as a first step. This will allow us to communicate about future plans and start the work of sharing information about the proposed association as well as about events and information relevant to our research community.

Our aim is to incorporate an association in the future and formalise its aims and objectives, but we want to do this democratically over the course of a number of meetings, culminating (if it goes well) in a conference sometime in 2026. To start this process of democratic discussion, we are aiming to hold a zoom meeting in April/ May 2025, where we can all discuss the plans going forward.

Please join the mailing list so that we have a strong foundation to start from and a way of communicating with the Australian research community.

Kind regards,
Sam Whiting

--With apologies for crossposting--


Dr Sam Whiting
Vice-Chancellor's Senior Research Fellow
School of Media and Communication, RMIT University

2024 Churchill Fellowship Recipient - Winston Churchill Trust
Fellow - Australian Basic Income Lab



Tel: +61 422 746 340, Email: whiting.samuel@gmail.com