There's a quiet revolution underway - a revolution that could result in the birth of an entirely new academic discipline. Spearheaded by John Hartley and Stuart Cunningham in QUT's Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi), and in collaboration with an international group of high-profile researchers, they're investigating the potential for joining elements of cultural studies, evolutionary economics, anthropology, and other disciplines in a new field called cultural science.
If successful, this would provide cultural studies with a rigorous scientific backbone and enable it to offer more quantitative and reliable data on cultural systems, while enabling economics to look beyond the study of stable markets and allowing it to grapple with creativity as an element of uncertainty and innovation. (Such needs have arisen for example out of the CCi's recent work in mapping the creative industries, which has required it to develop new methodologies for measuring and describing the impact of paid and unpaid, casual and full-time work in the creative industries on our overall economy.)
It's early days yet for cultural science, but if the track records of the individuals involved are any guide, it'll go far. For now, there's a Website with papers and presentations from the "Creative Destruction" meeting of the project's expert group in Brisbane in 27-28 March 2008 (I was lucky enough to attend the second day of this meeting); the site also hosts Popper Juice, the group's blog (with an interesting post from German researcher Carsten Hermann-Pillath, who applies cultural science ideas to the current struggle over public perceptions of China's role in Tibet)
Soon, the project will also launch the Cultural Science open access journal. Exciting times ahead...
