Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

tend to merely pay lips service to. Although adopting a “classic rock” radio format, the channel has also
become an important platform for “indie” music in all most of its local permutations in its nighttime and
weekend programming. This paper explores how BFM has not only played a role in the contestation of
Malaysian cultural politics but also as a site of contestation of Malaysian “indie-ness” on the airwaves.
6G
Cultural policy and planning (Chair, Ien Ang)
Ianto Ware* & Hugh Nichols*
Age
Culture, Civics and Local Council: Implementing Cultural Policy in the Post-Landry
This paper considers John Holden’s 2010 assertion that cultural policy has traditionally been concerned with
“the achievement of targets where people are treated not as individuals with cultural rights, but as clay to be
worked on.” The authors will speak from their experience within the City of Sydney’s cultural strategy team,
working to implement the Creative City cultural policy. In doing so, they will consider the potential to move
away from paternalistic notions of “culture” as deliverable, and pursue Justin O’Connor’s alternate definition
that, “Cultural policy at its broadest is about how we become citizens,” with a focus on agency, participation,
and barrier removal. Drawing from research commissioned by the City through the University of Technology
Sydney, the University of Tasmania, Western Sydney University, and collaboration with the University of
Sydney, methods will be proposed to connect cultural policy with to other areas, such as urban planning.
Tully Barnett
The Bermuda Triangle of Value: Voids, Gaps and Holes in Australian Cultural Policy
The 2015 Federal Government Senate Inquiry into the impact of the 2014 and 2015 Commonwealth Budget
decisions on the Arts received 2719 submissions. The robust response by Australian artists, arts
administrators and the broader community tells us the inquiry process was seen as a crucial intervention in a
moment of industry crisis. But it also answered a gap in the sector, providing an avenue for practicing artists
and arts administrators to talk about the industry in a way they haven’t been able to do before. This paper
considers the submissions and hearings testimony as a public body of material constructing the artist and
the state of the arts in the present moment under austerity and argues that the process itself was an
important moment in informal cultural reporting and professional development for independent artists,
speaking to notions of cultural value.
Christen Cornell Ambivalence, Intervention and Beijing’s Urban Change
Since the Chinese Communist Party’s extension of economic reforms in 1992, China’s cities have become
sites of dynamism and change, characterised by demolition, construction, and examples of informal or
“illegal” urbanism. This paper discusses my research of the Beijing arts community, Caochangdi – an art
district constructed “illegally” on what was once the outskirts of the city and since incorporated within Party
definitions of the “official” urban landscape. How, it asks, might China’s post-reform spatial change have
provided the conditions for new forms of political intervention, particularly given the lack of participatory
democratic institutions within the country? More specifically, how might these artists have exploited the
ambivalence within the country’s spatial bureaucracy to build institutions, literally and collectively, at the
everyday surface of urban change?
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