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

investor in their own fortunes who was rhetorically cast against unworthy persons such as refugees and the
unemployed. This vision was enacted through familiar “trickle-down” fiscal policy, but also a range of state
subsidies to investors and to consumers of privatised health and education services. The result was
Australia’s distinctive form of neoliberalism, with among the world’s highest private debt and property
prices, and the world’s most expensive set of tax expenditures (government subsidies to
investors/consumers/industry via tax concessions)—but also apparently a budget crisis that must now be
paid for by cuts to direct government spending on health, education and welfare.
7E
Girl knowledge and power (Chair, Kyra Clarke)
Crystal Abidin
Authentic replicas: Influencers, Knock-off culture, and Circuits of aspirational knowledge
Looking closely at knock-off material culture as facilitated by social media, this article investigates young
women Influencers’ and followers’ exchanges of financial, social, and cultural capital regarding counterfeit
products. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and through grounded theory analysis, I investigate
Influencers’ enactments of knock-off culture on social media and in physical spaces, and the ways in which
they posture as arbiters of taste, gatekeepers of discount luxury, and tastemakers of democratic aspirations.
Specifically, I examine a hierarchy of knock-off consumption and displays through a vocabulary of
euphemisms and approachable grammar, and an ecology of manufacturers, suppliers, models, and
consumers. Through these practices, Influencers create and curate circuits of aspirational knowledge in
which watered-down luxury fashion procures accretive value as authentic replicas.
Anne Harris
Creativity, Religion and Global Youth Cultures
This paper provides an intervention into debates about the identity practices and creative religious activities
of diasporic young women, who are forging new, globalised and transnational communicative citizenship
practices, communities and identities. Extending Appadurai, I theorise youth identities, cultures and
communities in conditions of globalisation, mobility, super-diversity and new life patterns. Through an 11-
year ethnographic project with South Sudanese and Samoan background Christian youth in Melbourne,
Australia, I demonstrate how they generate creative capital from a position of local embeddedness in a
Southern, subaltern, disaporic context that nonetheless always intersects with global, mobile and virtual
networks. This paper explores the complexity faced by young people who seek to express agency, politics,
connection and creativity locally and at the same time pursue global visibility and cachet through the
commodification and commercial applications of their images and outputs.
Kathleen Williams
Nostalgic Teens: Mediated Memories and Materiality in Rookie
US-based Rookie Mag (rookiemag.com) was launched in 2011 by then teen fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson. It
has become a popular community, full of content typically created by and for teen girls. Rookie encompasses
playful, networked articulations of girlhood, with contributions often using screen and media culture to
articulate seemingly ritualised elements of being a teen girl. This paper explores how evoking and playing
with temporality and collective/individual mediated memories (Van Djick 2007) can undermine notions of
authenticity and the privileging of lived experience in popular culture nostalgia. In particular, I look at
materiality in Rookie – from the printed yearbooks filled with illustrations and collage, to tutorials on how to
create pop culture “shrines” that draw upon copies and collections. This paper investigates how Rookie’s
community ties together the collective and individual lived experiences of teen girls through confession,
collecting, art, music and fashion.
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