Humanities

This report provides a basis for the measurement of the contribution arts and culture make to the public good in Australia. It suggests that contribution can be captured using three broad themes: economic development, cultural value, and engagement and social impact. The framework will enable collection of meaningful data and analysis of trends over time, and inform evidence based decision making and evaluation of public policy. It will also allow comparisons of these trends and benchmarking with the international cultural sector. Perhaps most importantly, it will increase public awareness of the value of arts and culture, increase our appreciation of the talent Australia produces, and enhance our understanding of cultural diversity.

Changes in cultural consumption and in modes of governance are prompting performing arts centres (PACs) to take a more proactive role in urban life; they are reconfiguring their internal and external spaces to improve how they engage with their publics and adjacent urban spaces; and they are developing strategies to better manage their cultural and social impacts. This paper draws on qualitative research with Queensland Performing Arts Centre audiences and cites some specific initiatives to test the proposition that in reinventing themselves as multiple-use civic resources, performing arts centres are potentially significant sites of cosmopolitan citizenship. It argues that in addition to the PACs’ symbolic functions and the expertise they contribute to public life, they provide linked physical and social spaces that embody and promote the values of diversity and community cohesion.

Researchers, practitioners and government agencies have begun to look to social capital discourse to provide cogent and adaptable rationales for performing arts organisations.  Following initial applications in the community arts, this work is now being undertaken across other public cultural and arts policy fields - including the performing arts - where the provision of cultural infrastructure is traditionally less tied to social service delivery. 

Using examples from Griffith University’s ‘Sustaining Culture’ research project, this paper identifies theoretical and methodological issues entailed in these recent developments and considers their significance for social capital discourse as a way to conceptualise relations between performing arts organisations and their publics.

In common with their international counterparts, Australia’s arts centres have been moving away from being venues for hire and are instead becoming producers and entrepreneurs; they are seeking to maintain standards of excellence while engaging larger and more diverse audiences; and they are doing all of this at a time when bricks and mortar cultural organisations are experiencing increased pressures brought about by changes in technology, patterns of cultural participation, and government expectations. These international trends can deliver economic, civic and artistic public benefits, yet they are also placing new emphasis on the arts centres’ capacities to provide cultural leadership.

This paper asks whether large performing arts centres produce a public sphere, identifies features that distinguish their leadership role and the public spheres it creates, and considers ways of representing these features. It draws on research currently being conducted by myself and my colleagues at Griffith University, working in partnership with a consortium of Australian performing arts centres.

Changes in cultural consumption and in modes of governance are prompting performing arts centres (PACs) to take a more proactive role in urban life; they are reconfiguring their internal and external spaces to improve how they engage with their publics and adjacent urban spaces; and they are developing strategies to better manage their cultural and social impacts. This paper draws on qualitative research with Queensland Performing Arts Centre audiences and cites some specific initiatives to test the proposition that in reinventing themselves as multiple-use civic resources, performing arts centres are potentially significant sites of cosmopolitan citizenship. It argues that in addition to the PACs' symbolic functions and the expertise they contribute to public life, they provide linked physical and social spaces that embody and promote the values of diversity and community cohesion. Yes Yes

IT IS two o'clock on a Sunday afternoon when the dreaded phone call comes in. A crisis threatens to destroy the hardearned reputation of the organisation and impact severely on the bottom line, so that it appears that only luck would ensure its survival. Research shows ...

This paper sets out our exploratory research based on an analysis of four decades of Australian national security and counterterrorism policy from the dual perspectives of information sharing with industry and information sharing with the media. We comb a rich seam of complex and interrelated policy and through a series of in-depth elite interviews, analyse how and why information sharing (the need-to-know) with these two stakeholder groups developed and evolved in the way it did in practice. We find that a time when national security and counterterrorism policy was beginning to emerge in the 1970s, in practice the media was considered an essential part of counterterrorism efforts while industry was peripheral. This stands in sharp juxtaposition to contemporary policy and practice where the media is largely frozen out and industry is central to national security and counterterrorism efforts. We identify the shifts in policy and practice are explained through a maturing of policy dri...

After a disaster, the media typically focus on who is to blame. However, relatively little is known about how the narrative of blame plays out in media coverage of the release of official disaster reports. This paper examines coverage by two Australian newspapers (The Courier-Mail and The Australian) of the release of the Queensland Floods Commission of Inquiry's Interim Report and its Final Report to identify whether and how the news frame of blame was used. Given the absence of blame in the Final Report, the newspapers resorted to the frame of 'failure' in news and feature articles, while continuing to raise questions in editorials and opinion pieces about who was to blame. This study argues that situating coverage of the report within the news frame of failure and questioning who was to blame for the disaster limited the media's ability to facilitate a discussion about the prevention of similar disasters in the future.

Much of the research about disasters has focused on the poor and unethical practices of journalists reporting on disasters, but relatively little has been written about best practice approaches to news media coverage of such events. This article uses two sources of data, interviews with senior emergency managers in eight countries and the body of research on news media coverage of disasters, to develop a best practice schema for journalists reporting disasters in two phases – before they occur and as they unfold. There is relatively little research on best practice approaches to reporting disasters; therefore, we also include the literature about news media coverage of disasters as this enabled identification of key problems with reportage of disasters. We conclude this article with suggestions about how this schema might be further refined and note some additional areas for research that might be pursued as a result of the best practice approach.

THE SHIFTING SANDS OF SOCIAL MEDIA AND ELITE SPORT: A CASE STUDY IN HOW TO MANAGE RELATIONSHIPS AND REPUTATIONS Maria Hopwood, Northampton Business School, University of Northampton, UK maria.hopwood@northampton.ac.uk Hamish McLean, School of Humanities, Griffith University, Australia AIM OF ABSTRACT/PAPER Social media engagement is changing the relational dynamic between organisations and individuals and their publics. This is particularly evident in the world of elite sport where the market value of an elite athlete is measured by their public reputation which is pinned on healthy relationships with stakeholders, such as fellow athletes, team managers, coaches and, importantly, fans (Hopwood, 2010). In fact, social media analysts have attributed much of Twitter’s growth to early adopters in the sports world, and as Gibbs and Haynes (2013) have discovered, Twitter is the predominant social media used by athletes, teams, and leagues for directly engaging with their wider publics. As...