Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Professor Lecture - “Is our Future Creative?”

Presented by Professor Toby Miller, Sir Walter Murdoch Distinguished Professor of Cultural Policy Studies, for the School of Arts.

Abstract-

Creative-industries chorines luxuriate in a seemingly never-ending Marxist/Godardian dream. They fish, film, finance, and fornicate from morning to midnight, thanks to innovative media technologies that obliterate geography, sovereignty, and hierarchy. This deregulated, individuated world makes consumers into producers, frees the disabled from confinement, encourages new subjectivities, rewards intellect and competitiveness, links people across cultures, and allows billions of flowers to bloom in a post-political cornucopia. The principal proponent of this worldview, the economic geographer Richard Florida, says a ‘creative class’ is revitalizing rust belt towns in the Global North that had been devastated by the relocation of agriculture and manufacturing to places with cheaper labor. Their revival is allegedly driven by a magic elixir of tolerance, technology, and talent. In this talk, I ask whether the creative industries are our future, in two senses: first, does the concept make sense as a description of economic development and a prescription for public policy?; and second, should the arts/humanities focus on it in our teaching and research?

About the Presenter-

Toby Miller is the Sir Walter Murdoch Professor of Cultural Policy Studies in the School of Arts at Murdoch University, Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University/Prifysgol Caerdydd, and Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Riverside. The author and editor of over thirty books, his work has been translated into Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Turkish, German, and Swedish. His two most recent volumes are Greening the Media (with Richard Maxwell) and Blow Up the Humanities (both 2012). He has two edited volumes in press that will appear later this year: The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture and The Sage Handbook of Television Studies (the latter co-edited with Manuel Alvarado, Milly Buonnano, and Herman Gray). His adventures can be scrutinized at www.tobymiller.org.