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

9D
Capitalising culture: critique and renewal (Chair, Tony Bennett)
This panel draws on research currently ongoing for the project Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transational
Dynamics funded by the Australian Research Council. It draws on the survey and interview material produced by the
study to presents three critical engagements with cultural capital theory related to its application to three sets of
socio-cultural relations.
Tim Rowse
Tastes for Indigenous Culture
Is there such as a thing as “taste for Indigenous culture” in Australia today? If there is, can we measure it
empirically and discover its social distribution? This paper will explore the data generated by a survey
(n=1202) for the “Australian Cultural Fields” Project in 2015. The survey included items that we understand
to be Indigenous “things”, authors, or performers (including sports stars). The data thus allow us to pose and
answer a number of questions. What “Indigenous items” are well known and liked? What are the social
characteristic (class, education level, sex age) of those who know and like these Indigenous things/people?
The survey also asked respondents what they did not like, and so we can ask: what are the social
characteristics of those who express distaste for the Indigenous items in the ACF survey? In this paper, we
will report data that allow us to explore whether taste (or distaste) for Indigenous things is uniform – its
levels and social composition – across six fields of cultural production (Visual Arts, Music, Literature,
Heritage, Sport and Television).
Tony Bennett
Putting culture into class
In this paper we reflect on the different ways in which the concerns of culture analysis and class analysis
have been brought together in the history of cultural capital research and on the limitations and future
prospects for the future analysis of class/culture conjunctions this tradition represents. We do so by first
reviewing the findings of the Australian Cultural Fields project concerning the organisation of classed tastes
across the different cultural fields – visual art, heritage, literature, television, sport, and music – examined in
the project. We than compare the implications of these findings for the analysis of class culture relations
with those arising the accounts of the relations between class, culture and inequality emerging from two
recent surveys of cultural tastes and practices in the UK and Australia: the Great British Class Survey and the
ANU Social Class in Australia Poll.
Greg Noble & Anna Pertierra
Ethnicising Australian cultural consumption
This paper explores the consequences of cultural diversity for the social organisation of cultural consumption
in Australia. Migration has always been fundamental to the constitution of colonial and national formations
on this continent. Yet the increasing ethnic and linguistic diversity of Australia’s migration patterns – and the
generational changes that ensue – have produced a diversification of cultural production and consumption
seen in an increasing array of goods, sites, audiences and institutions. Such diversification in the cultural
practices of Australians does not always map neatly onto the rigid notions of ethnic community recognised
by multicultural and cultural policy. This paper will draw from interviews with members of particular,
ethnically-defined cohorts as well as from the broader cohort of participants in the Australian Cultural Fields
project, to address a number of questions: – are there patterns of cultural consumption that correspond to
ethnically-defined communities? – to what extent have “mainstream” practices been reshaped by recent
transformations to cultural diversity? – what do interviewees tell us about the relations between Australian,
diasporic and transnational orientations in cultural practices?
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