Lauren England, PhD Student at King’s College London, will be presenting her research on UK craft higher education and professional practice at a number of seminars across Australia in May.
In these seminars Lauren will provide an overview of her research and the educational practices associated with professional development in UK craft degree programmes. She will also discuss approaches used by crafts graduates in establishing careers and businesses as independent creative producers. This will include her recommendations for higher education providers, policy makers and craft sector stakeholders to facilitate the professional development of early-career makers and support the establishment of sustainable craft enterprise.
8th May, University of Melbourne, Melbourne https://www.facebook.com/events/283287179038546/
14th May, RMIT Craft Initiative Forum, Melbourne
16th May, University of South Australia, Adelaide
21st May, University of Canberra, Canberra 
21st May, Australian National University, Canberra

​Prof Stuart Cunningham, QUT
“What do regional Australian creative economies look like? Notes from the field”
Dr Roberta Comunian and Prof Alessandra Faggian, Kings College (UK) and GSSI (Italy)
“Creative graduates in the UK: lessons learnt and unanswered questions”
Prof Susan Luckman, UniSA
“Crafting Self: Promoting the making self in the creative micro-economy”

What do regional Australian creative economies look like? Notes from the field / Stuart Cunningham
This presentation will review what we are learning in medias res from a current Linkage project on the creative economy in Australian regions. The presentation will be structured around the following four research themes: how conceptually and industrially coherent on the ground are the accepted definitions of the creative industries/creative economy? What is the relationship between the creative industries and discourses and practices advancing innovation? What meaningful (to government and industry actors as well as scholars) comparative analysis can be made of Australian regions? What meaningful connections can be made between quantitative/statistical and qualitative/fieldwork-based insights that enrich each other?
Stuart Cunningham is a leading researcher internationally in creative industries. He is Distinguished Professor of Media and Communications, Queensland University of Technology. He directed an Australian first, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, to 2014. He has served in leadership roles in advocacy and governance in the research, screen and library sectors. He is a Member of the Order of Australia and has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar and a Leverhulme Foundation Visitor. Recent books include Hidden Innovation: Policy, Industry and the Creative Sector and the co-authored Social Media Entertainment: The new intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

Creative graduates in the UK: lessons learnt and unanswered questions / Roberta Comunian and Alessandra Faggian
Drawing on our extensive research since 2010, this presentation will explore key findings and current knowledge of creative graduates in the UK. We will consider our contributions to the field in relation to the career outcomes and patterns of creative graduates, differences across subject areas (including the arts & humanities and digital creatives), the role of geography and institutional frameworks in determining career and salary outcomes, as well as graduates’ career satisfaction. The presentation will highlight the questions that remain unanswered and the importance of pushing the agenda further to gain a better understanding of the value of creative degrees to the creative industries and beyond.
Roberta Comunian is Reader in Creative Economy at the Department for Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King's College London. She is interested in: relationship between public and private investments in the arts, art and cultural regeneration projects, cultural and creative industries, creativity and competitiveness. She has been Marie Curie Fellow at University of Newcastle (Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies) investigating the relationship between creative industries, cultural policy and public supported art institutions. She is currently working on an AHRC research network exploring the development of the Creative Economy in Africa. She has previously researched the role of higher education in the creative economy and has recently explored in various papers the career opportunities and patterns of creative graduates in UK.
Alessandra Faggian is Professor of Applied Economics, Director of Social Sciences and Vice Provost for Research at the Gran Sasso Science Institute, L’Aquila, Italy. She is Past President of the North American Regional Science Council (NARSC) and co-editor of Journal of Regional Science. Dr Faggian’s research interests lie in the fields of regional and urban economics, demography, labour economics and economics of education. Her publications cover a wide range of topics including migration, human capital, labour markets, creativity and local innovation and growth. She has co-authored over 80 academic publications. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Oxford Economics Papers, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Feminist Economics, Regional Studies, Papers in Regional Science, Journal of Regional Science and The Journal of Economic Geography.

Crafting Self: Promoting the making self in the creative micro-economy / Susan Luckman
In this presentation, I offer a summary of the key findings that arose from ‘Crafting Self’, the ARC-funded study exploring how online distribution is changing the environment for operating a creative micro-enterprise. The project sought to: identify the attitudes, knowledge and skills required to develop and run a sustainable creative micro-enterprise, including the acquisition of making/production skills, business skills and acumen, personal capacities and decision-making around self-marketing; analyse the spatial and temporal negotiations necessary to run an online creative micro-enterprise; and examine how the contemporary creative economy contributes to growing ethics-based micro-economic consumer and producer relationships that privileges small-scale production, environmentally-sustainable making practices and the idea of buying direct from the maker.
Susan Luckman is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries in the School of Creative Industries and Research Director of the Creative Work Mobilities Research Node, Hawke EU Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. She is the author of Craft and the Creative Economy (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Locating Cultural Work: The Politics and Poetics of Rural, Regional and Remote Creativity (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), co-editor of The ‘New Normal’ of Working Lives (Dynamics of Virtual Work Series, Palgrave 2018), Craft Economies (Bloomsbury 2018), Craft Communities(Bloomsbury 2020), and Sonic Synergies: Music, Identity, Technology and Community(Ashgate 2008), and of numerous book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles and government reports on cultural work, creative industries and creative micro-entrepreneurialism.

Download the event PDF here below

Dr Scott Brook and Dr Roberta Comunian have been invited to respond with a blog entry in response the recent IFS report on HE subsidies in the current loan system in the UK: ‘Econometrics of valuing income contingent student loans using administrative data: groups of English students’ .
The response highlight three main issues connected with our current work and project:
Firstly, low returns to creative graduates are not only consistent with an industry sector in which rewards are highly skewed (the ‘winner takes all’ economy), but the creative sector itself is widely regarded as exemplary of emergent trends in the general labour market;
Secondly, the purposes and outcomes of university study for students are far broader than a simple investment in future employment, and encompass civic and cultural agendas necessary for liberal democratic societies, (and which is ‘core business’ for the creative industries). That students continue to study in such fields despite the rising costs of study and labour market penalties (which are hardly a secret) is testimony to a vocational disposition that is adjusted to this broader mission.
Thirdly, universities themselves are now major players in the creative sector, with media and arts infrastructure and programs premised on broader value claims to be enablers of cultural participation, public discourse and social enterprises. Again, students are key to this engagement.

The full blog contribution can be read and download from 
https://pec.ac.uk/blog/accounting-for-creative-graduates