From policy to curriculum: drivers of the growth in creative industries courses in the UK and Australia

Abstract

A striking feature of the 2010s has been significant growth in the number of creative industries courses being offered worldwide, seemingly independently of the fortunes of creative industries as a policy concept. This paper undertakes an analysis of the growth in such courses in the United Kingdom and Australia, reviewing course content, host Faculty, and the underlying approach underpinning the degree programs. Based on this material plus interviews with key informants, the paper identifies five features of these programs: (1) loose and eclectic definitions of the creative industries; (2) the importance of the link between digital technology and creative practices; (3) the extent to which they may be displacing cultural studies, particularly at the postgraduate level; (4) the importance of international student demand; and (5) their inherently interdisciplinary nature. It is proposed that while eclecticism and interdisciplinarity have been necessary features of the early development of creative industries courses, there is a growing requirement for codification of the field, in order to benchmark the various programs against shared objectives. This requires industry and government engagement in order to provide the necessary scaffolding for such course design and development.

Keywords:

• Creative industries
• interdisciplinary
• curriculum
• engagement and impact
• international education
• cultural policy

Notes

1 By contrast, in business management programs and among economists, the debate tends to be about the extent to which the creative industries are different from other industries. This relates to the question of whether their development is comprehensible through the application of conventional tools of microeconomics, as with cultural economics (e.g. Throsby, 2010), or whether creative industries challenges some of the orthodoxies of the cultural economics field (Potts, 2011). In a leading cultural economics text, Towse (2010) addresses this question by having different sections on the economics of ‘traditional’ arts and cultural heritage, and the economics of the creative industries.

2 In line with the internationalisation agenda, the University of Nottingham also has a campus at Ningbo in China. The University of Nottingham Ningbo Campus (UNNC) was opened in 2004, and was the first Sino-foreign university. UNNC has a research Institute for Creative and Digital Cultures, and is expected to offer creative industries courses in China in the near future.

3 The extent to which there has been a significant policy turn away from creative industries has clearly been overstated in some of these accounts. In the UK, where it has most commonly been equated with ‘New Labour’ and the ‘Third Way’, creative industries policy discourse is now very much mainstreamed, with both the Conservatives and Labour strongly involved in developing policy initiatives for the sector, the existence of industry lobby groups such as the Creative Industries Federation, and research initiatives such as the AHRC Creative Economy Programme. See Cunningham and Swift (2019) for further discussion of the international uptake of creative industries in the 2010s.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies through the Bicentennial Fellowship Scheme (RM Number: 2017001432). The author has derived no financial benefit from the application of this research.