Susan Luckman
Biographic Data
| ID | 135410 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Luckman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Luckman |
| SIGNATURE | LUCKMAN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of South Australia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6047-4767 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 143 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The artisanal imaginaries of contemporary production
Ideas of “craft” and “craftsmanship” have long been mobilized in middle-class Global North markets to promote the romanticized authenticity of artisanal goods, but what happens when these ideas are applied to industrially-made products? This article analyzes the artisanal imaginaries of the Australian Made Campaign to explore how the campaign taps into the growing cultural desirability of the handmade and the artisanal, and heightened concerns ab…
Consumer nationalism post-Covid
The COVID-19 pandemic forced Australian consumers to pay greater attention to how local supply chains intersect with global networks, but this emphasis on local provisioning was part of a larger pattern of growth in small-scale and local production. Presenting findings from a representative national survey, this article identifies who is willing to pay more for locally made goods and how motivations for buying locally differ by age, income and ge…
Culture in practice
Agile producers and consumer-saviours
COVID-19's supply chain disruptions saw small-scale, artisanal food and craft producers experience surges in demand from consumers seeking locally made goods. This article analyses Australian news coverage promoting this ‘turn to the local’, with a focus on mainstream news outlets from March 2020 to February 2023. We identify two dominant narratives: the ‘producer pivot’ and the ‘consumer-saviour’. Using Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad’s (2018) wor…
There’s a lot of luck involved’
The challenges of building and sustaining a creative career are well-established, as is the degree to which opportunities are either opened or foreclosed through the complex intersectionality of inequalities. Yet creative aspirants persist in pursuing creative work, sustaining themselves through survival strategies variously theorised as ‘hope labour’ and ‘aspirational labour’. Drawing upon data from an arts mentoring programme, this article expl…
Mentoring as affective practice
This paper discusses the potential contributions that an arts mentoring program can make to the support of artists and creative practitioners contending with the challenges of the post-pandemic creative sector. In so doing, it also considers possible criticisms of the efficacy of arts mentoring, given the uncertainty and precariousness that characterise careers in the cultural sector. To explore these ideas, the paper presents an analysis of inte…
Making bodies, craft skills and the legacies of policy ‘blokeism’
Drawing upon over a decade of research into craft and craft skills in Australia, this article identifies the skills challenges growing within the Australian making ecosystem. Bringing together qualitative and quantitative research findings, it finds that one sector, building and construction, dominates the occupational landscape, at the expense of a richer, more diverse and future-ready skills base. The article argues that what, why and how we ma…
Vicarious expertise
This article examines how qualities of expertise are constructed and sustained within the televisual world of craft reality competition television. We suggest that part of the appeal of this relatively recent media typology beyond any didactic or instructional interest, is a desire to observe expertise and thus gain perceived but highly circumscribed access to the community of practice that is presented by these television shows. We identify thre…
Who counts, and is counted, in craft
Drawing upon customised Census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this Cultural Commons article argues cultural studies researchers need to remain attentive to the absences and erasures within craft, and cultural and creative practice more generally. It offers a numbers-driven insight into the exclusions of craft work, critically exploring the limits of the quantitative capturing of craft making practices and of the biases of statisti…
Pathways into Creative Working Lives
This book presents research on pathways into creative work. The promise of ‘doing what you love’ attracts new entrants to creative industries. Is that promise betrayed by the realities of pathways into creative work, or does a creative identification offer new possibilities?
Creative Aspiration and the Betrayal of Promise? The Experience of New Creative Workers
The promise of ‘doing what you love’ continues to attract new aspirants to creative work, yet most creative industries are so characterised by low investment, shifting foci and ongoing technological innovation that all promises must be unreliable. Some would-be creative workers negotiate their own pathways from the outset, ‘following their dream’ as they attempt to convert personal enthusiasms and amateur activities into income-earning careers. O…
I’d (still) rather be a cyborg’
This article identifies the rise of a series of tropes around authenticity, retreat and celebration of the artisanal as they manifest around the growing popularity of cooking and craft as activities that have become vehicles for a larger reimagining of ideal middle-class modes of living across much of the Global North. Through media examples of cooking and craft that valorise nostalgia and ‘dropping out’, and following McRobbie’s work on the crea…
Fire, pestilence and the extractive economy
Australia has witnessed long-standing cuts in the arts and culture federal budget. Most recently, the disappearance of the arts portfolio into a “super-ministry” along with infrastructure, transport, regional development and communications further signals the lack of support, both ideologically through public rhetoric, and financially through (absent) support packages, the current federal government holds towards the arts and arts workers. This p…
Craftspeople and Designer Makers in the Contemporary Creative Economy
This series explores worker experience and working lives in the global sector of the cultural and creative industries.There are rising numbers of aspirants to creative work and rising numbers of graduates and trainees, yet the available employment is increasingly precarious and complex.To address this complexity, the Creative Working Lives series presents original research from across multiple disciplines, including media and cultural studies, ge…
The devil is in the level
This article applies a quantitative analysis of gender diversity variables to custom data sets of 2011 and 2016 Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data for Film, TV and Radio employment. Prima facie, employment figures across a whole sector or employment segment can appear to be broadly representative of the Australian population, but looking more closely, it becomes apparent that the 'devil is in the level'. Although there is often parity at…
The New Normal of Working Lives
This critical, international and interdisciplinary edited collection investigates the new normal of work and employment, presenting research on the experience of the workers themselves. The collection explores the formation of contemporary worker subjects, and the privilege or disadvantage in play around gender, class, age and national location within the global workforce. 0Organised around the three areas of: creative working, digital working li…
Craft entrepreneurialism and sustainable scale
Craft and design-led creative practices are presently enjoying a zeitgeist moment of popularity, driven by consumer demand for unique, innovative and/or handmade objects. However despite the capacity to scale-up, craftspeople and designer makers continue to challenge conventional capitalist ideas of what entrepreneurial “success” looks like. Drawing upon data from a 4-year study of Australian designer makers, this article problematizes the digita…
Sonic Synergies
Creative encounters in the volatile north
Craft and the Creative Economy
Craft and the Creative Economy examines the place of craft and making in the contemporary cultural economy, with a distinctive focus on the ways in which this creative sector is growing exponentially
Guitar makers
Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, Successful qualitative research
Women's Micro-Entrepreneurial Homeworking
Enabled by the global distribution affordances of the Internet, increasing numbers of creative producers of the handmade—the majority of whom are women—are working from home as sole traders. Selling their wares via online marketplaces such as Etsy, such women often do so as a means by which to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment. In this article I argue that rather than seeing the exponential growth of an online craft economy as …
Uncovering Nudity
A review of Ruth Barcan's Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Berg, Oxford, 2004
The Aura of the Analogue in a Digital Age
This article examines the renewed popularity of the handmade by examining the current renaissance in the street credibility of previously disparaged women's craft practices, particularly those employing yarn (for example knitting, crochet, needlepoint and weaving) and fabric (sewing, felting). The author historically locates current debates around craft production and creative work by drawing upon the British Arts and Crafts movement, with its ow…
Creativity without Borders? Rethinking remoteness and proximity
This article examines remoteness and proximity as geographical conditions and metaphors. It stems from a large government-funded research project which sought to examine the extent and uniqueness of the creative industries in Darwin—a small but important city in Australia's tropical Top End region, and government and administration capital of the sparsely populated Northern Territory. In talking to creative artists from diverse fields about their…
Craft entrepreneurialism and sustainable scale
Craft and design-led creative practices are presently enjoying a zeitgeist moment of popularity, driven by consumer demand for unique, innovative and/or handmade objects. However despite the capacity to scale-up, craftspeople and designer makers continue to challenge conventional capitalist ideas of what entrepreneurial “success” looks like. Drawing upon data from a 4-year study of Australian designer makers, this article problematizes the digita…
The Aura of the Analogue in a Digital Age
This article examines the renewed popularity of the handmade by examining the current renaissance in the street credibility of previously disparaged women's craft practices, particularly those employing yarn (for example knitting, crochet, needlepoint and weaving) and fabric (sewing, felting). The author historically locates current debates around craft production and creative work by drawing upon the British Arts and Crafts movement, with its ow…
Life in a northern (Australian) town
In the present article, we seek to bring critical attention to the idea of ‘scene’ in relation to musical activity in Darwin, an iconic northern, remote, (post)colonial city. The idea of ‘scenes
Women's Micro-Entrepreneurial Homeworking
Enabled by the global distribution affordances of the Internet, increasing numbers of creative producers of the handmade—the majority of whom are women—are working from home as sole traders. Selling their wares via online marketplaces such as Etsy, such women often do so as a means by which to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment. In this article I argue that rather than seeing the exponential growth of an online craft economy as …
Craftspeople and Designer Makers in the Contemporary Creative Economy
This series explores worker experience and working lives in the global sector of the cultural and creative industries.There are rising numbers of aspirants to creative work and rising numbers of graduates and trainees, yet the available employment is increasingly precarious and complex.To address this complexity, the Creative Working Lives series presents original research from across multiple disciplines, including media and cultural studies, ge…
Bazaar encounters
The aim of this special issue of Continuum is to focus on food markets as significant spaces of intercultural exchange, everyday belonging, and citizenship. Contributions to the issue are informed by two crucial questions: in contemporary cosmopolitan cities, how do people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds manage the task of living together; and further, how do cities' shared but distinct histories of colonialism-postcolonialism in t…
GIS, Ethnography, and Cultural Research
This article discusses how geographic information system (GIS) technologies were used to enhance ethnographic methodologies within a cultural research project, Creative Tropical City: Mapping Darwin's Creative Industries. It shows how mapping technologies can broaden the scope of data available via interview practices and produce innovative ways of communicating research results to stakeholder communities. A key component of the interview process…
Fire, pestilence and the extractive economy
Australia has witnessed long-standing cuts in the arts and culture federal budget. Most recently, the disappearance of the arts portfolio into a “super-ministry” along with infrastructure, transport, regional development and communications further signals the lack of support, both ideologically through public rhetoric, and financially through (absent) support packages, the current federal government holds towards the arts and arts workers. This p…
Going Bush and Finding One's 'Tribe
Tropical cosmopolitanism and outdoor food markets in (post)colonial Australia
In this article I offer a critical examination of Darwin’s contemporary food markets and, in particular, the Mindil Beach Night Markets, as sites of 'tropical cosmopolitanism'. To do so, I focus on the intersection of place and food to illuminate what it reveals about the rich and complex history of cultural exchange on this small city site and, in turn, what this may reveal about contemporary postcolonial multiculture
There’s a lot of luck involved’
The challenges of building and sustaining a creative career are well-established, as is the degree to which opportunities are either opened or foreclosed through the complex intersectionality of inequalities. Yet creative aspirants persist in pursuing creative work, sustaining themselves through survival strategies variously theorised as ‘hope labour’ and ‘aspirational labour’. Drawing upon data from an arts mentoring programme, this article expl…
Mentoring as affective practice
This paper discusses the potential contributions that an arts mentoring program can make to the support of artists and creative practitioners contending with the challenges of the post-pandemic creative sector. In so doing, it also considers possible criticisms of the efficacy of arts mentoring, given the uncertainty and precariousness that characterise careers in the cultural sector. To explore these ideas, the paper presents an analysis of inte…
I’d (still) rather be a cyborg’
This article identifies the rise of a series of tropes around authenticity, retreat and celebration of the artisanal as they manifest around the growing popularity of cooking and craft as activities that have become vehicles for a larger reimagining of ideal middle-class modes of living across much of the Global North. Through media examples of cooking and craft that valorise nostalgia and ‘dropping out’, and following McRobbie’s work on the crea…
The devil is in the level
This article applies a quantitative analysis of gender diversity variables to custom data sets of 2011 and 2016 Australian Bureau of Statistics Census data for Film, TV and Radio employment. Prima facie, employment figures across a whole sector or employment segment can appear to be broadly representative of the Australian population, but looking more closely, it becomes apparent that the 'devil is in the level'. Although there is often parity at…
Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, Successful qualitative research
Future Audiences for Australian Stories
The development of global social networking sites using Web 2.0 technologies (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc.) is signalling a shift in media usage towards an environment in which the distinction between producer and consumer is less clearly defined. While audiences still demand and enjoy a quality professional product, their active personal experience of media production means that they are no longer content to remain outside…
From the Margins to the Mainstream
As elsewhere, the music industry in Queensland comprises two tiers. The first tier is composed of products and services engaged by major music labels and commercially successful artists who at times attract significant sales. The second tier - or what is sometimes referred to as the 'grassroots' (Gibson, 2002) - largely consists of independent musicians, production personnel and producers attracting both niche and at times mainstream audiences. C…
Promotional Desires
For a variety of reasons, the traditional popular or 'mass' media have attempted to position themselves on the Internet through the establishment of often elaborate Websites, The potential future delivery of film, television and radio through the Internet represents a serious challenge to the continued viability of media companies and their vested modes of delivery and exhibition. Their Internet sites represent their reaction to a possible comput…
Agile producers and consumer-saviours
COVID-19's supply chain disruptions saw small-scale, artisanal food and craft producers experience surges in demand from consumers seeking locally made goods. This article analyses Australian news coverage promoting this ‘turn to the local’, with a focus on mainstream news outlets from March 2020 to February 2023. We identify two dominant narratives: the ‘producer pivot’ and the ‘consumer-saviour’. Using Rosalind Gill and Shani Orgad’s (2018) wor…
Who counts, and is counted, in craft
Drawing upon customised Census data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this Cultural Commons article argues cultural studies researchers need to remain attentive to the absences and erasures within craft, and cultural and creative practice more generally. It offers a numbers-driven insight into the exclusions of craft work, critically exploring the limits of the quantitative capturing of craft making practices and of the biases of statisti…
Mapping the regulation of dance parties
Festive Emplacements
A review of Rachel Bowditch, On The Edge of Utopia: Performance and Ritual at Burning Man and Graham St John (ed.), The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance
Promotional Desires
For a variety of reasons, the traditional popular or 'mass' media have attempted to position themselves on the Internet through the establishment of often elaborate Websites, The potential future delivery of film, television and radio through the Internet represents a serious challenge to the continued viability of media companies and their vested modes of delivery and exhibition. Their Internet sites represent their reaction to a possible comput…
Mapping the regulation of dance parties
Gather ‘round and I’ll tell you a tale’
A Short History of Cultural StudiesJohn HartleyLondon: Sage, 2003, 189 pp. (pbk), ISBN 0-7619-5028-1 Once upon a time, there was a Marxist intellectual project, operating both within the organized intellectual establishment and extra-academically, which has come to be known as cultural studies. This project, among other fundamental beliefs, sought to challenge establishment status quos and academic sacred cows which hierarchicized knowledge, life…
Going Bush and Finding One's 'Tribe
From the Margins to the Mainstream
As elsewhere, the music industry in Queensland comprises two tiers. The first tier is composed of products and services engaged by major music labels and commercially successful artists who at times attract significant sales. The second tier - or what is sometimes referred to as the 'grassroots' (Gibson, 2002) - largely consists of independent musicians, production personnel and producers attracting both niche and at times mainstream audiences. C…
Life in a northern (Australian) town
In the present article, we seek to bring critical attention to the idea of ‘scene’ in relation to musical activity in Darwin, an iconic northern, remote, (post)colonial city. The idea of ‘scenes
Turning Play into Pay
Digital technologies are clearly enabling greater access to cultural production, broadening the spaces in which we market our sense of self, and thus facilitating small-scale creative entrepreneurialism. However, alongside the many opportunities undoubtedly offered by co-creator Web 2.0 technologies, true digital literacy requires an as yet unclear level of control over the whole process - both in the short and long term - in order to ensure that…
Mosquitoes in the mix
This paper contributes to recent debates about whether urban policy discourses are transferable and what is at stake in their translation. It draws on discussion of Darwin (Northwest Territory, Australia), a tropical savanna location that the local government wants to promote as a ‘creative city’, without quite knowing what this might require. We discuss relevant debates on research knowledge construction, the creative city and the path‐dependent…
Future Audiences for Australian Stories
The development of global social networking sites using Web 2.0 technologies (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc.) is signalling a shift in media usage towards an environment in which the distinction between producer and consumer is less clearly defined. While audiences still demand and enjoy a quality professional product, their active personal experience of media production means that they are no longer content to remain outside…
GIS, Ethnography, and Cultural Research
This article discusses how geographic information system (GIS) technologies were used to enhance ethnographic methodologies within a cultural research project, Creative Tropical City: Mapping Darwin's Creative Industries. It shows how mapping technologies can broaden the scope of data available via interview practices and produce innovative ways of communicating research results to stakeholder communities. A key component of the interview process…
Creativity without Borders? Rethinking remoteness and proximity
This article examines remoteness and proximity as geographical conditions and metaphors. It stems from a large government-funded research project which sought to examine the extent and uniqueness of the creative industries in Darwin—a small but important city in Australia's tropical Top End region, and government and administration capital of the sparsely populated Northern Territory. In talking to creative artists from diverse fields about their…
Tropical cosmopolitanism and outdoor food markets in (post)colonial Australia
In this article I offer a critical examination of Darwin’s contemporary food markets and, in particular, the Mindil Beach Night Markets, as sites of 'tropical cosmopolitanism'. To do so, I focus on the intersection of place and food to illuminate what it reveals about the rich and complex history of cultural exchange on this small city site and, in turn, what this may reveal about contemporary postcolonial multiculture
Bazaar encounters
The aim of this special issue of Continuum is to focus on food markets as significant spaces of intercultural exchange, everyday belonging, and citizenship. Contributions to the issue are informed by two crucial questions: in contemporary cosmopolitan cities, how do people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds manage the task of living together; and further, how do cities' shared but distinct histories of colonialism-postcolonialism in t…
Locating Cultural Work
Drawing upon field work and interviews with cultural workers in the UK and Australia, this book examines the cultural work experiences of rural, regional and remotely located creative practitioners, a
Introduction
The Tribes of Burning Man
Despite the advent of digital recording devices of every size and shape (read: camera phones), there have been not nearly enough attempts to adequately document in brilliant photography and text the electronic festival underground along the West Coast of North America. Though Burning Man is quite possibly one of the world's largest if not most significant gatherings of freak culture and various media abound that render spectacular its participant…
Uncovering Nudity
A review of Ruth Barcan's Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Berg, Oxford, 2004
The Aura of the Analogue in a Digital Age
This article examines the renewed popularity of the handmade by examining the current renaissance in the street credibility of previously disparaged women's craft practices, particularly those employing yarn (for example knitting, crochet, needlepoint and weaving) and fabric (sewing, felting). The author historically locates current debates around craft production and creative work by drawing upon the British Arts and Crafts movement, with its ow…
Craft and the Creative Economy
Craft and the Creative Economy examines the place of craft and making in the contemporary cultural economy, with a distinctive focus on the ways in which this creative sector is growing exponentially
Guitar makers
Virginia Braun and Victoria Clarke, Successful qualitative research
Women's Micro-Entrepreneurial Homeworking
Enabled by the global distribution affordances of the Internet, increasing numbers of creative producers of the handmade—the majority of whom are women—are working from home as sole traders. Selling their wares via online marketplaces such as Etsy, such women often do so as a means by which to balance caring responsibilities with paid employment. In this article I argue that rather than seeing the exponential growth of an online craft economy as …
Creative encounters in the volatile north
Sonic Synergies
Sociology (32 works) · Political science (28 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (22 works) · Art (20 works) · Law (15 works) · Visual arts (13 works) · Business (11 works) · Economics (11 works) · Public relations (11 works) · Aesthetics (10 works)