Challenges & the future

This final session encourages reflection at the end of a symposium that has considered the power of bringing together Humanities research and creative practice. We will have covered topics ranging from the significance of First Nations design, to ethical methodologies, difficult art and cancel culture, the place of creative practice research in the contemporary Australian university, and heard from performers, composers, designers and artists.

This session is an opportunity to reflect on what’s next. Papers will include the mismatch between government policy and training in the areas of art, craft and design, possible discussion of censorship and cancel culture or the so called culture wars, the significance of arts and cultural backgrounds and training in driving the creative economy, and new audiences and ways of being for future cultural organisations 

Speakers

Technical & creative skills for fraught futures: The need for integrated approaches to industry policy, creative arts & education

This paper argues for a more integrated approach to Australian policy-making across cultural, industrial, education and training sectors. Springing from my earlier research into the working lives of “technical creatives” and “creative technicians” – precarious practitioners whose labour and training often spans creative, industrial and education domains – I demonstrate how current industrial, education and creative arts policy frameworks fail to recognise the hybrid skillsets and cross-sectoral nature of contemporary working lives. The creative practitioners I studied often combine manual, technical, industrial, creative and design expertise, but their contributions are often misunderstood or overlooked due to siloed policies and outdated occupational classifications.

My research surfaces the lived impacts of this fragmentation: insecure employment, undervalued skills, skill shortages and lack of recognition for existing capacities. More urgently, these issues risk a systemic loss of capability in fields essential for climate adaptation and industrial transitions. There is a sovereign need for practical, hybrid skillsets, not only for decarbonisation transitions, but also for survival and recovery in climate-disaster-prone futures.

These overlaps are not hypothetical, they are already present in the lives and labour of Australian practitioners. What’s needed now is a coherent, cross-sectoral policy framework that supports these realities and addresses the skills, production and survival challenges of a climate-changed world. For instance, industrial policy must better recognise the value of smaller scale local production, maintenance and repair, and the creative capacities embodied in these activities. Likewise, cultural and arts policies must account for technical roles so often ignored, such as arts technicians who have the technical skills to affect urgent, complex repairs on equipment, or craft educators whose community networks enable community action in times of disaster recovery. Education and training policy must likewise reorient around valuing material, technical, creative and craft-based knowledge.

Dr Jessie Stein

Stein is an interdisciplinary design researcher and oral historian whose work focuses on labour, technology and industries in transition. Shifting between historical and contemporary contexts, her research explores workers’ experiences in manufacturing, industrial craft, the creative industries and vocational education. In 2025 she completed an ARC DECRA fellowship and published two edited books: Designing through Planetary Breakdown and Working through Planetary Breakdown (both Routledge 2025, co-edited with Chantel Carr). These collections emerged from All Hands on Deck (2023), Stein and Carr’s international symposium on labour, skill and climate change. Stein is the author of two monographs: Industrial Craft in Australia (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) and Hot Metal (Manchester UP 2016). In 2024 she directed the public seminar series History Now. Stein is engaged with historical and design collections across Australia, including through projects with the Powerhouse and Museums Victoria. She has led two oral history projects collected by the National Library of Australia: Reshaping Australian Manufacturing and Makers, Manufacturers & Designers. Her current research investigates the history and contested politics of hi-vis workwear in Australia (with E Humphrys & B Frankham).

https://jesseadamsstein.com

Lisa Havilah

Photo credit: Toby Burrows (tobyburrows.com)

Lisa Havilah is the Chief Executive of the Powerhouse Museum. Through her visionary leadership she is establishing a new museum paradigm for one of Australia’s oldest and most important cultural institutions. The landmark renewal of the Powerhouse is the largest cultural infrastructure project in Australia since the Sydney Opera House. It includes the creation of the museum’s new flagship, Powerhouse Parramatta; the revitalisation of Powerhouse Ultimo; the expansion of the Powerhouse Castle Hill and the digitisation of the Powerhouse Collection. From 2012 to 2019, Lisa was the Director of Carriageworks. Under her leadership Carriageworks experienced extraordinary audience, artistic and commercial growth, becoming the fastest growing cultural precinct in Australia. Previously, she was Director of Campbelltown Arts Centre, where she pioneered an internationally renowned contemporary arts program that brought together culturally and socially diverse communities.

 

 

 

Professor Sarah Luckman

Susan Luckman is Professor of Culture and Creative Industries, Founding Director of the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre (CP3), and the Cultural and Creative Industries Research Platform Leader of the EU Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of South Australia/Adelaide University. Susan is internationally recognised for her research into cultural trends in digital technologies and the subsequent renewal of interest in craft and the analogue they have both enabled and provoked. Working in direct dialogue with creative communities, her research informs both policy and individual practice and her training in Cultural Studies informs an approach to knowledge generation that values the richness of human experience and recognises the importance of inclusion and diversity. Susan has been a Chief Investigator on 6 ARC and 3 EU awarded projects and is a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts (2022-2026). She is the author of multiple books, peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters and public reports on platform economies, cultural and creative work, craft, creative industries and creative micro-entrepreneurialism.

Dr Marion McCutcheon

Dr Marion McCutcheon is a communications economist and holds the position of Senior Research Fellow at the University of Canberra’s News and Media Research Centre. She has extensive experience in providing policy-oriented research and advice within the Australian Government, and as an academic researcher focussing on media industries and creative industries. Her interests include the role of creative production in economic systems, and how society benefits from investing in culture. Current research includes adapting the trident model of the creative and cultural industries to include qualifications, and studies of creative and cultural practitioners working in education in South Australia and in mining in Western Australia. Recent work includes the books Transnational TV Crime: From Scandinavia to the Outback, co-authored with the University of Wollongong’s Sue Turnbull, and the forthcoming Lost Culture: The Unravelling of Cultural Policy and National Drama in the On-Demand Age, written with Anna Potter from the Queensland University of Technology.

Associate Professor Scott Brook

Scott Brook is a Creative and Cultural Industries researcher with a focus on creative labour, cultural policy and gift economy. He is Associate Professor of Communication in the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, and was previously a Research Fellow in the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra. His work combines discursive and quantitative approaches to understanding cultural practice at the level of populations, and is strongly engaged with post-Bourdieusian questions around the historical sociology of creative vocations. He has completed two ARC Discovery projects on creative graduates in Australia and the UK, and is currently a Chief Investigator on two ARC Linkage projects; the first analysing multiple-job holding, platform employment, and embedded work in the CCIs, and the second a collaboration with Clock Your Skills (UK) to develop micro-credentials in Australian youth arts. He has a long-standing engagement in Australian cultural policy, having undertaken cultural planning studies for local government, given evidence at the 2015 Senate Inquiry into Commonwealth arts funding, and undertaken commissioned research for Creative Australia. His most recent book is a coauthored study with economists and geographers on gender and CCI employment; Gender and the Creative Labour Market (Palgrave 2022).

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