Journal Articles by Zelmarie Cantillon
Heritage & Society, 2022
Sport mega-events have the capacity to transform host cities both
materially and symbolically. Th... more Sport mega-events have the capacity to transform host cities both
materially and symbolically. This article explores the urban
reimaging potentials of mega-event legacies through a case
study of the 2018 Commonwealth Games held on the Gold Coast,
Australia. For the Gold Coast, one of the desired outcomes of the
Commonwealth Games and its legacies was to aid in reorienting
the city’s identity from a beachside resort to a mature,
sophisticated, world-class city. Drawing on observational
fieldwork and literature research, the article considers a particular
legacy project – the Commonwealth Walkway, a self-guided
heritage walk – to analyze how heritage initiatives factor into
strategies for urban reimaging. The article finds that although the
Commonwealth Walkway may enhance a sense of continuity in a
city usually marked by impermanence, its sanitized, celebratory
approach to the city’s colonial past and present undermines both
claims of sophistication and intended legacies for social justice.
Archival Science, 2022
Zines are self-published, do-it-yourself booklets that have a long history as tools for activism ... more Zines are self-published, do-it-yourself booklets that have a long history as tools for activism in social movements. While archival studies has already explored the collection and preservation of zines as cultural artefacts, this article explores the capacity for zines to act as a form of community archive. The article examines See You at the Paradise, a zine co-created with Norfolk Island community members for a research project focused on Kingston and Arthur's Vale Historic Area. Drawing on Michelle Caswell's six principles of community archive discourse-participation, shared stewardship, multiplicity, activism, reflexivity, valuing affect-we analyse the extent to which zines and zine-making, as product and process, can be understood as community archive. In doing so, we propose collaborative reminiscence as a seventh principle. The article finds that zines, as community archive, work to strengthen the presence of marginalised voices in dominant historical narratives while also offering an important resource for community-building and political resistance.
Journal of Heritage Tourism, 2022
Do-it-yourself (DIY) and community-based efforts to preserve popular music heritage often take pl... more Do-it-yourself (DIY) and community-based efforts to preserve popular music heritage often take place in tangible sites open to the public. These places contrast with authorised sites of heritage in their form, but not their function, and are often judged equally by visitors in terms of cultural value. This article analyses Tripadvisor user reviews of 11 DIY institutions of popular music heritage to highlight the tension between the production of cultural value by such places and the expectations of visitors. As unintentional sites of tourism, DIY institutions of popular music heritage find themselves caught between providing access to unique collections and experiences prized by niche audiences, and producing an entertainment value attainable only through the higher level budgets and skill sets found in authorised heritage institutions. This article contributes to an understanding of how the producers and consumers of DIY institutions understand value, while focusing on the neglected experience of end-users in the broader space of heritage engagement. In doing so, it draws attention to the co-creation of heritage experiences in online and physical spaces.
Journal of Sociology, 2020
Blended learning and flipped classroom models are increasingly encouraged in higher education, wh... more Blended learning and flipped classroom models are increasingly encouraged in higher education, where notions of flexibility and technological development inform institutional systems and strategies. This article presents results from an Australian study on redesigning and delivering an introductory sociology course using a combination of such models. Four central elements of the redesign are highlighted: overall course format; use of mini-lectures; face-to-face activities; and our assessment model. We present analysis of students' and instructors' understandings and experiences of the redesign over three course iterations, to offer insight into the unfolding and responsive dynamics involved in implementing blended and flipped models. We aim to contribute to the ongoing implementation of similar models in the context of changing institutional environments and expectations, as well as to broader projects for pedagogical enrichment in sociology.
International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2020
Deindustrialisation contributes to significant transformations for local communities, including r... more Deindustrialisation contributes to significant transformations for local communities, including rising unemployment, poverty and urban decay. Following the ‘creative city’ phenomenon in cultural policy, deindustrialising cities across the globe have increasingly turned to arts, culture and heritage as strategies for economic diversification and urban renewal. This article considers the potential role that popular music heritage might play in revitalising cities grappling with industrial decline. Specifically, we outline how a ‘cultural justice approach’ can be used within critical heritage studies to assess the benefits and drawbacks of such heritage initiatives. Reflecting on examples from three deindustrialising cities – Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UK – we analyse how popular music heritage can produce cultural justice outcomes in three key ways: practices of collection, preservation and archiving; curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and mobilising communities for collective action.
Journal of Sociology, 2020
In recent decades, the heritage sector has become increasingly precarious amid the rise of auster... more In recent decades, the heritage sector has become increasingly precarious amid the rise of austerity neoliberalism, impacting both the efficacy of heritage institutions and the labour experiences of those who run them. While scholarly literature has regularly examined these impacts for mainstream heritage institutions, little work considers volunteer-run, do-it-yourself (DIY) community heritage organisations. This article takes a serious leisure perspective to explore what constitutes ‘good work’ for volunteers in a DIY heritage institution, the Australian Jazz Museum (AJM). Drawing on interviews with 26 AJM volunteers, we discuss some of the ‘rewards’ and ‘costs’ of career volunteering in this institution. Our research suggests that the conditions for good work are contingent on the efforts of volunteers in management roles, while the conditions for bad work are heightened by austerity policies affecting funding opportunities. The case study also highlights the need to consider the value of work beyond remuneration.
Australian Historical Studies, 2020
In Australia, the community heritage sector – galleries, libraries, archives, museums and histori... more In Australia, the community heritage sector – galleries, libraries, archives, museums and historical societies managed by volunteers – plays a significant role in recording and preserving the diversity of Australia’s cultural heritage. However, these community heritage organisations face uncertain futures. This article offers four examples of heritage organisations located in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia which have struggled with organisational sustainability arising from various financial, human, physical, skills, and expertise challenges. We assess some of the common problems threatening the longevity of community heritage organisations and what action is needed to safeguard this sector into the future.
Leisure Studies, 2020
This article takes a serious leisure perspective to examine the costs associated with career volu... more This article takes a serious leisure perspective to examine the costs associated with career volunteering in DIY heritage institutions focused on the collection, preservation and curation of popular music’s past. While the rewards of serious leisure have been analysed extensively in the literature, costs are addressed less frequently. Moreover, Stebbins’ framing of costs has been critiqued as ambiguous and underdeveloped. In this article, we draw on Stebbins’ tripartite model of tensions, dislikes and disappointments to analyse costs that emerged from ethnographic interviews undertaken with volunteers in 13 DIY popular music heritage institutions. Types of costs included tensions that were interpersonal, relational, financial, temporal (work, family, leisure), and related to well-being (emotional, physical); dislikes centred on shortages of dependable volunteers, volunteers who demonstrate a ‘lack of care’, and ineffective leadership; and disappointments focused on being let down by others, unsuccessful funding applications, and organisational change. Although rewards outweigh costs, we find that recognising the costs involved for career volunteers in DIY heritage institutions is crucial for contextualising rewards and perseverance, as well as for understanding how different types of costs overlap and exacerbate one another.
Journal of Heritage Tourism, 2020
This article examines the emergence of urban heritage walks on the Gold Coast, Australia. As a po... more This article examines the emergence of urban heritage walks on the Gold Coast, Australia. As a popular beachside mass tourism destination, the Gold Coast has a longstanding reputation for rapid development and for lacking historical and cultural depth. In this context, heritage walks present an opportunity to reorient the city’s identity and to stage a sense of heritage in the urban environment. Focusing on a case study of the Gold Coast’s Southport Heritage Walk (SHW), this article aims to analyse the discursive, material and political dimensions of urban heritage walks, and how practices of heritage unfold in places marked by rapidly changing urban landscapes and resident populations. Drawing on observational fieldwork, as well as interviews with key individuals involved in designing the walks, the article discusses the dominant narratives of history and urban identity enshrined in the SHW, and how these discourses are encountered and interpreted within the context of the contemporary materialities of lived space. Although the SHW aims to highlight the city as a place with a rich history and heritage, the walk’s missing interpretive markers and scarce remnants of built heritage instead emphasise the city’s ongoing tensions between development and preservation.
Leisure Sciences, 2018
Community-based, do-it-yourself (DIY) archives and museums of popular music are cultural institut... more Community-based, do-it-yourself (DIY) archives and museums of popular music are cultural institutions that can serve important social and affective functions. In this article, we examine how DIY heritage institutions create a sense of community and promote wellbeing for their volunteers, operating as informal gathering spaces, or “third places.” Using the Australian Jazz Museum — a DIY popular music heritage institution run exclusively by volunteers, most of whom are older adults and retirees — as a case study, we explore how third place can manifest in such sites of serious leisure. Drawing on interview data, we discuss volunteers’ experiences of the AJM in relation to its sociality and affective atmosphere and the role this institution plays in their lives. In doing so, we analyse the characteristics which contribute to DIY heritage institutions as spaces for caring, community, and wellbeing.
Australian Feminist Studies, 2017
Archiving has become an increasingly important practice in the preservation of feminist and queer... more Archiving has become an increasingly important practice in the preservation of feminist and queer histories. In this article, we pay specific attention to the emerging body of literature on feminist archives of popular music, many of which are community-based, DIY initiatives. These community-led archives aim to comprehensively collect the ephemeral, intangible heritage of feminist music cultures that have traditionally been excluded in popular music canons and marginalised by mainstream heritage institutions. The literature revealed that feminist music archives function as much more than spaces for preservation – they are affective as much as they are intellectual, and they are key sites for activism and community-building. These two themes – activism and affectivity – thread together the body of literature, providing both the driving force behind these DIY archives and their potentiality in the communities of interest they cater to. The community archivists accounted for in the literature have all engaged in practices of queering the community music archive; taking the mainstream heritage institution as a model and rebuilding it from the ground up, renegotiating its boundaries and notions of linear history, and reconfiguring its practices to account for lives lived in the margins of the mainstream.
Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 2015
Australia’s Gold Coast typically positions itself as a luxurious, upmarket resort city or a famil... more Australia’s Gold Coast typically positions itself as a luxurious, upmarket resort city or a family-friendly, ‘fun in the sun’ holiday destination. At the same time, the Gold Coast lifestyle is often associated with hedonism, sexuality and excess. Yet the city is also home to over half a million residents whose daily lives – work, education and leisure – routinely take place within and against these powerful and familiar representations. Thus, the city’s identity can be seen as constituted by a series of conflicting ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ narratives. The ‘official’ narrative is produced by how the city markets itself to tourists, and comes to include popular imaginaries of place that these representations construct and perpetuate. Beyond this, however, residents produce varied and multiple ‘unofficial’ narratives through their engagements with the actualities of their locality as well as with its metanarratives. Surfers Paradise, as the main tourist hub and entertainment precinct of the Gold Coast, is a site of convergence for these competing narratives. Drawing on Lefebvre’s (2004) rhythmanalysis, this article explores how conflicting narratives and disjunctions in identities of place manifest themselves in spatial practice in Surfers Paradise.
Book Chapters by Zelmarie Cantillon
Music and Heritage: New Perspectives on Place-making and Sonic Identity, 2021
Wollongong is a regional deindustrialising Australian city located south of Sydney, New South Wal... more Wollongong is a regional deindustrialising Australian city located south of Sydney, New South Wales. Although Wollongong’s economy was long dominated by metal manufacturing, this industry downsized considerably throughout the 1980s and 1990s and was put under further pressure with the 2008/2009 Global Financial Crisis. The city’s strong working class roots and the urban transformations brought on by the decline of the steelworks significantly shaped Wollongong’s live music scene and characteristic ‘Wollongong sound’, predominantly focused on rock, grunge, metal and hip hop. Now branding itself as the ‘City of Innovation’, Wollongong has diversified its economy through the growth of its health and education sectors and a renewed emphasis in local policy on developing the creative industries. At the same time that the local council is increasingly supporting live music production and consumption, a number of popular music heritage initiatives commemorating the city’s popular music traditions have emerged. Drawing on 20 semi-structured interviews conducted with key stakeholders and heritage practitioners, this chapter discusses the suite of activities connected to the Steel City Sound heritage project. We highlight how precarious and fragile popular music heritage initiatives can be, despite their vital cultural justice outcomes for the local community.
Music Cities Evaluating a Global Cultural Policy Concept, 2020
Collection edited by: Ballico, Christina, Watson, Allan (Eds.)
In this chapter, we interrogate h... more Collection edited by: Ballico, Christina, Watson, Allan (Eds.)
In this chapter, we interrogate how a turn to popular music heritage can represent an important strategy for reinstating a sense of well-being for disenfranchised communities in post-industrial music cities. Our specific interest is in the potential of popular music heritage initiatives to enhance community members’ participation within the socio-cultural (online and offline) spaces of Birmingham, the UK’s largest city outside London and one in the process of being branded a ‘music city’. With its rich musical heritage, our case study of Birmingham highlights how heritage initiatives can have a positive impact on individuals within a community impacted by industrial decline. The turn to popular music heritage, we argue, can enhance civic pride (Power and Smyth 2016) through the creation of spaces that foster a greater sense of well-being and attachment to place among the community of interest involved in such heritage activity. As this chapter demonstrates, the heritage sector, and in particular the community heritage sector, can make significant contributions to the making of the music city in ways that support the flourishing of local communities.
Remembering Popular Music’s Past: Memory-Heritage-History, 2019
Remembering Popular Music’s Past: Memory-Heritage-History, 2019
Co-authored with Bob Buttigieg and Sarah Baker.
Remembering Popular Music’s Past: Memory-Heritage-History, 2019
Making Media: Production, Practices and Professions, 2019
The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, 2018
Youth Cultures and Subcultures: Australian Perspectives, Feb 2015
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Journal Articles by Zelmarie Cantillon
materially and symbolically. This article explores the urban
reimaging potentials of mega-event legacies through a case
study of the 2018 Commonwealth Games held on the Gold Coast,
Australia. For the Gold Coast, one of the desired outcomes of the
Commonwealth Games and its legacies was to aid in reorienting
the city’s identity from a beachside resort to a mature,
sophisticated, world-class city. Drawing on observational
fieldwork and literature research, the article considers a particular
legacy project – the Commonwealth Walkway, a self-guided
heritage walk – to analyze how heritage initiatives factor into
strategies for urban reimaging. The article finds that although the
Commonwealth Walkway may enhance a sense of continuity in a
city usually marked by impermanence, its sanitized, celebratory
approach to the city’s colonial past and present undermines both
claims of sophistication and intended legacies for social justice.
Book Chapters by Zelmarie Cantillon
In this chapter, we interrogate how a turn to popular music heritage can represent an important strategy for reinstating a sense of well-being for disenfranchised communities in post-industrial music cities. Our specific interest is in the potential of popular music heritage initiatives to enhance community members’ participation within the socio-cultural (online and offline) spaces of Birmingham, the UK’s largest city outside London and one in the process of being branded a ‘music city’. With its rich musical heritage, our case study of Birmingham highlights how heritage initiatives can have a positive impact on individuals within a community impacted by industrial decline. The turn to popular music heritage, we argue, can enhance civic pride (Power and Smyth 2016) through the creation of spaces that foster a greater sense of well-being and attachment to place among the community of interest involved in such heritage activity. As this chapter demonstrates, the heritage sector, and in particular the community heritage sector, can make significant contributions to the making of the music city in ways that support the flourishing of local communities.
materially and symbolically. This article explores the urban
reimaging potentials of mega-event legacies through a case
study of the 2018 Commonwealth Games held on the Gold Coast,
Australia. For the Gold Coast, one of the desired outcomes of the
Commonwealth Games and its legacies was to aid in reorienting
the city’s identity from a beachside resort to a mature,
sophisticated, world-class city. Drawing on observational
fieldwork and literature research, the article considers a particular
legacy project – the Commonwealth Walkway, a self-guided
heritage walk – to analyze how heritage initiatives factor into
strategies for urban reimaging. The article finds that although the
Commonwealth Walkway may enhance a sense of continuity in a
city usually marked by impermanence, its sanitized, celebratory
approach to the city’s colonial past and present undermines both
claims of sophistication and intended legacies for social justice.
In this chapter, we interrogate how a turn to popular music heritage can represent an important strategy for reinstating a sense of well-being for disenfranchised communities in post-industrial music cities. Our specific interest is in the potential of popular music heritage initiatives to enhance community members’ participation within the socio-cultural (online and offline) spaces of Birmingham, the UK’s largest city outside London and one in the process of being branded a ‘music city’. With its rich musical heritage, our case study of Birmingham highlights how heritage initiatives can have a positive impact on individuals within a community impacted by industrial decline. The turn to popular music heritage, we argue, can enhance civic pride (Power and Smyth 2016) through the creation of spaces that foster a greater sense of well-being and attachment to place among the community of interest involved in such heritage activity. As this chapter demonstrates, the heritage sector, and in particular the community heritage sector, can make significant contributions to the making of the music city in ways that support the flourishing of local communities.
The book reviews the material and symbolic production of lived spaces in these resorts, considering the mutually constitutive, mutually transformative relations between their spatial formations, built environments, popular imaginaries, representations, narratives of identity, rhythms, and the experiences and practices of both tourists and locals. In doing so, it argues for more nuanced ways of conceptualising tourism, globalisation and spatiality, reimagining how these phenomena unfold in lived spaces.
Taking a cultural studies approach to urban analysis, the book demonstrates the value in embracing complexity, fluidity, partiality and uncertainty. It will be of interest to students and researchers of tourism, geography, cultural studies, development studies, anthropology and sociology.
In-depth chapters cover key themes around historiography, heritage, memory and institutions, alongside case studies from around the world, including the UK, Australia, South Africa and India, exploring popular music’s connection to culture both past and present.
Wide-ranging in scope, the book is an excellent introduction for students and scholars working in musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, critical heritage studies, cultural studies, memory studies and other related fields.
Digital platforms enable practices devoted to the past that suggest extensions of the empowering practices of community archiving, collective memory and public history. Taking advantage of these spaces are an expansive range of sites that extend collective interests in popular music heritage and the creation of community archives to the online world (for a summary see: Collins and Long 2014; Baker, 2015, Collins 2015).
In the titles and rationale of online activities there is a promiscuous deployment of terms such as history, heritage, memory, community, curation, archive and indeed nostalgia. However, the degree to which as consciousness is expressed about such terms, or regarding a sense of the historical or indeed of and recognizably archival intention is something that merits assessment. In equal measure, such sites can be closed and restrictive in their policing of community as much as those that are open and inviting to all. Thus, the generation of social and cultural capital amongst participants in the co-creation of sites of memory prompts reflection on the implicit cultural politics of such activities and of public history as popular practice.
In this chapter we explore the meanings of such sites and the motivations of individuals and communities in the creation and sustaining of online records – perhaps archives (Baker and Collins 2015) - of popular music history and heritage. We ask: what do these sites have to tell us about the nature and character of community and the archive? What are the particularity of practices focussed on popular music’s past and the affordances of the digital? What’s at stake in the formulation of community around the products of the cultural industries, formed in the indeterminate space of the digital in relation to the specificities of time, geographical space and place of collective memory?
Keywords
Online, music, archives, history, heritage, communities