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

(CI) policy narratives and their critiques. Such narratives would typically read the establishment of
institutions like Carriageworks as a welcome answer to urban decline, tied into place competition; and their
critiques would argue against this pro-market analysis. This paper argues that the establishment of
Carriageworks was by no means a historical given, as the typical CI approaches may suggest. An ethnography
of this centre’s formation reveals the crucial role of emotional labour in allowing this institution to exist and
subsequently thrive. Tracing the work of emotional labour helps us to not only account for alternative forces
critical to the production of such institutions, but consider forms of value for them that fall outside of
creative industry metrics.
Scott East* & Ben Hightower* Investing in culture: Art and Social Justice
For many, the 2014 Sydney Biennale was overshadowed by a campaign led by refugee advocacy groups
targeting the event’s links with Transfield, a company awarded a multi-million dollar contract with the
Australian Government to indefinitely detain refugees. The campaign sought to publicly make visible the
connections and tensions between art, business and social justice. The range and intensity of the responses
that followed allows us an example from which to unpack similar movements for divestment. This is often
focused on encouraging individuals and institutions to divest financially from socially and environmentally
unjust practices in order to create social change. Alternative opportunities for social justice are possible
when a broader sense of investment in culture is explored.
George Morgan Creative Workers, Inequality and the Social Factory Lock-Out
“The metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class.” (Hardt and Negri,
Commonwealth). Social theorists have divergent perspectives on the “social factory” and the plight of those
who labour within it. Some (Hardt and Negri, 2009) see it as both a site of “flexploitation” and of the
flowering of the creative commons that can generate the conditions for a radically new political and
economic system. Others (Pratt and Gill, 2008) see the hyper-competition of new capitalism as eroding the
social dimension of the social factory, creating more individualised environments. Capitalism conscripts the
energy of independent creativity by collapsing the work- life division and developing what de Peuter calls a
“parasitical relation of the market to the common” (de Peuter 2011). This paper draws on data from
interview young people from working class backgrounds in Sydney’s western suburbs, who are trainees or
early career workers in creative fields. They are remote from the places and social networks through which
work is allocated in their chosen fields and are thus effectively locked out of the social factory.
9H
Digital Cultures and Publics in China and the Chinese Diaspora (Chair and discussant, Terry Flew)
The world’s largest internet population is now in China, which also is the base of many of the worlds largest Internet
companies (Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent) and social media platforms (Weibo, WeChat). It is also one of the most vibrant
nations in the world for electronic commerce, and the Chinese government has put the internet at the centre of its
current economic strategy through Internet + and support for start-ups and maker spaces. Yet there has been
relatively little detailed analysis of cultures of internet use in China. It is also important to note that “the Chinese
internet” does not simply refer to internet use in China itself, but to the very large Chinese diasporic populations
around the world.
Liangen Yin
Xi Dada loves Peng Mama: Personality Cult as a cultural phenomenon in China
225