School of Culture & Creative Arts

Professor Philip Schlesinger, who is leading the Glasgow end of a current Partnership Collaboration with the University of Sydney, organised an invitation-only symposium in the ARC on 29-30 March on ‘Policy Futures for the Digital Creative Economy’.

This showcased cutting-edge research at the Centre for Cultural Policy Research and CREATe, the UK Copyright and Creative Economy Centre, as well as that of our Sydney counterparts. 

Professor Schlesinger of the School of Culture & Creative Arts and Deputy Director of CREATe, said: “This really worked as an encounter across disciplinary boundaries and diverse interests. It took off spectacularly during in-depth exchanges on policy and research between academic researchers, a legislator, and regulators from Ofcom and the Competition and Markets Authority. It was a rare, unbridled, private conversation, and the more valuable for that. As a foundational encounter, this visit from Sydney, and our colleagues from Université Paris-Dauphine, has set the stage for further developments.”

Professor Terry Flew, University of Sydney's leading analyst of digital change, opened the symposium with a lecture on Australian cultural policy. Future-oriented contributions around the table ranged across algorithms, creativity and AI, creative labour, copyright, climate change, sports media, new challenges facing regulation, and public service media.

The ARC programme kicked off with a public lecture on 28 March by University of Sydney’s Professor John Hartley, a leading international figure in media and cultural studies. His lecture was titled “‘Present at their own making’: In the era of global-digital media, how do we make a pan-demic class?”. The lecture opened an intense debate with the audience on whether a new problem-solving class could address the climate crisis and other global problems.

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First published: 5 April 2023