Articles

• Diversity, Credibility and Cultural Labour as ‘Skill’: Racialised Experiences of Young People in Creative Industries.
  Rimi Khan. (2026) In: Journal of Applied Youth Studies.[PDF]
  
  ABSTRACT
  This article investigates how diversity agendas in the creative industries shape systems of value and credibility for racialised young workers. It asks whether the 21st century skills framework, which includes skills and competencies like ‘social and cultural awareness,’ can be leveraged to recognise the cultural labour and embodied knowledge of racialised youth. Using data from an action research study of non-white, migrant-background interns at a global media organisation’s Australian office, the article examines how these young people mobilise ‘diversity cred’. It is argued that ‘diversity cred’ functions both as a specific formation of subcultural value, and as a strategic resource for creative industries companies looking to signal good organisational citizenship. The study highlights the interns’ challenges, including the burdens of cultural labour and feelings of non-belonging conditioned by a racially coded (white) habitus within the workplace. It also reveals young people’s capacity for critical and transformative leadership in these industries, despite the commodification of their racialised knowledge.
  
  

• Reading the Creative Industries with Deleuze: How Creative are the Creative Industries?
  Cameron, A. & Hickey-Moody, A. (2024)
  In: Qualitative Inquiry. Online first.
  
  ABSTRACT
  This article develops a definition of creativity that is informed by the work of Gilles Deleuze, Dan Harris, Susan Luckman, and others. We explore its application in the context of the creative industries in Australia. Through our empirical interviews conducted as part of an Australian Research Council–funded project called Vital Arts, we delve into the multifaceted nature of creativity, which we argue is not always accounted for in the bureaucratic organization, categorization, and funding of the creative industries. We outline the measurements used by key governmental, nongovernmental, and policymaking bodies in Australia to categorize and fund the creative industries. These metrics reveal blind spots in how the creative industries are institutionally organized and treated when considering the Deleuzian ontology of creativity that actually motors creative work. We argue that many creative jobs and industries exist outside traditional bureaucratic definitions and categories, and through the concepts of affect, becoming, the major and the minor, as well as fabulation, from Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, we explore these dynamics further.
  
  

• Youth arts as popular education: cultural studies at the edges of the creative industries
  Hickey-Moody, A., Kelly, P., Brook, S., Hulbert, T., Cornell, C., Khan, R. (2023).
  In: Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 36, 699 - 710.
  
  ABSTRACT
  Youth arts is a form of education that operates primarily through affect and, perhaps because of this, has not received attention in terms of its capacity to develop young people’s employability. In this paper we identify and discuss the much vaunted and highly desirable ‘21st century skills’ learnt in youth arts settings. Drawing on arguments first advanced by Dick Hebdidge and Raymond Williams, we show that while 21st century skills are learnt through affect, the processes through which this learning proceeds produces skills that are seen as valuable commodities. Taking the everyday seriously as a site for learning, we explore youth arts projects as a site for skills development and argue for a framing of micro-credentials that at once recognizes and problematizes this modality of training. We do so by outlining how our reading of cultural studies scholarship can provide a foundation for understanding the everyday spaces of youth arts as critical sites of knowledge production. Examining the intersections of identity, being and culture as pedagogical, we outline how the everyday experiences of diverse youth participating in arts might be captured so as to build pathways into the future based on competency in ‘the now’.

Podcasts