Locating Cultural Work (PDF)

SUSAN LUCKMAN is Associate Professor in the School of Communication, International Studies and Languages at the University of South Australia, Australia. She co-edited the anthology on creative music cultures and the global economy Sonic Synergies.

'A lovely book that takes seriously the efforts of cultural workers to live good lives, and that considers their struggles with compassion and intelligence. Its originality lies in bringing together histories and theories that have been only very rarely employed in the burgeoning research on cultural industries.' - David Hesmondhalgh, Director of Media Industries Research Centre, University of Leeds, UK

'Finally, a book that excavates creativity from its holed-up, hipster, inner-city scene! Locating Cultural Work situates creativity in diverse and sometimes challenging places beyond the metropolis. In this kaleidoscopic book Susan Luckman addresses bigger questions of the precarity of cultural work, the impacts of gentrification on rural places, the opportunities and constraints of tourism and digital connectivity, philosophical and political antecedents, and the embodied and everyday travails of being creative in the countryside. If creativity is to play a part in refashioning rural and regional places, then this book has the answers and the warnings.' - Chris Gibson, Professor of Human Geography and Deputy Director of the Australian Centre for Cultural Environmental Research, University of Wollongong, Australia

'Who makes at the margins? In this erudite and elegantly-written book, Susan Luckman uncovers the diverse and distributed geographies of cultural work and explores thecomplex lives of those committed to the production of creative art, craft and culture. In challenging common assumptions about the Romantic legacy, the history of the handmade, and the ethical bankruptcy of modern work, Luckman brilliantly reveals the continuous and cyclical nature of cultural production, and deftly exposes the intangible, sensory and affective qualities of place that inspire today's cultural workers'. Mark Banks, Reader in Sociology, The Open University, UK