Professors – Cultural Infrastructure

Professor Deborah Stevenson

Distinguished Professor Ien Ang

Emeritus Professor David Rowe

Professor Paul James

Professor of Cultural Research

Institute for Culture and Society

Deborah Stevenson is a Professor of Sociology and Urban Cultural Research in the Institute for Culture and Society whose research activities and interests are focused in particular on arts and cultural policy, cities and urban life, and place and identity. She has published widely on these topics including the recent books, The City (Polity), Cities of Culture: A Global Perspective (Routledge) and Tourist Cultures: Identity, Place and the Traveller (co-authored, Sage). In addition, she is co-editor of the Research Companion to Planning and Culture (Ashgate) and Culture and the City: Creativity, Tourism, Leisure (Routledge). She is the co-author of The City after dark: cultural planning and governance of the night-time economy in Parramatta.

Professor Stevenson is an editor of the Journal of Sociology and the Journal of Policy Research in Tourism, Leisure and Events and a member of the editorial boards of leading journals, including the International Journal of Cultural Policy. Her research program has been supported by external funding from a range of sources, and she has been a Chief Investigator on eight successful ARC grants with her two recent projects being Recalibrating Culture: Production, Consumption, Policy and Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics. Professor Stevenson has worked as an advisor and consultant to all levels of government including most recently as a member of the Ministerial Reference Group for the NSW Arts and Cultural Policy Framework.

Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society

Distinguished Professor Ien Ang was the founding Director of the Institute for Culture and Society. She is one of the leaders in cultural studies worldwide, with interdisciplinary work spanning many areas of the humanities and social sciences. Her books, including Watching Dallas, Desperately Seeking the Audience and On Not Speaking Chinese, are recognised as classics in the field and her work has been translated into many languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Turkish, German, Korean, and Spanish. Her most recent books include The Art of Engagement: Culture, Collaboration, Innovation (University of Western Australia Press, 2011, co-edited with Elaine Lally and Kay Anderson) and Chinatown Unbound: Trans-Asian Urbanism in the Age of China (co-authored with Kay Anderson, Andrea Del Bono, Donald McNeill and Alexandra Wong).

Professor Ang’s wide-ranging work deals broadly with patterns of cultural flow and exchange in our globalised world. She is the recipient of numerous Australian Research Council grants, including a prestigious ARC Professorial Fellowship (2005-2009). Her current ARC research project is entitled The China Australia Heritage Corridor (with Dr Denis Byrne). As a leading scholar in the field and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, she is frequently called on for keynote addresses in Australia and internationally. She is a champion of collaborative cultural research and has worked extensively with partner organisations such as the NSW Migration Heritage Centre, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, The Special Broadcasting Service, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the City of Sydney.

Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society

David is a Fellow of both the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of the Humanities; Honorary Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Bath; and Research Associate, Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy, SOAS University of London. Formerly he was Director of the Cultural Institutions and Practices Research Centre at The University of Newcastle. Author of over 200 chapters and refereed journal articles, his latest books are Sport, Public Broadcasting, and Cultural Citizenship: Signal Lost? (co-edited, 2014) and Making Culture: Commercialisation, Transnationalism, and the State of ‘Nationing’ in Contemporary Australia (co-edited, 2018). David’s work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, Spanish, and Turkish. His translated 2011 work Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures was an Outstanding Book Selection of the National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Korea in 2018. He has been a research consultant and advisor to many public and private organisations, including Newcastle, Sydney, Maitland and Parramatta City Councils; New South Wales Office of Liquor, Gaming and Racing; and Arts (now Create) NSW. He is the co-author of The City after Dark: Cultural Planning and Governance of the Night-time Economy in Parramatta and Recalibrating Culture: Production, Consumption, Policy.

David has been a Chief Investigator on 10 Australia Research Council projects and was 2015 Researcher of the Year in the Vice-Chancellor’s University Awards. A frequent expert commentator on social and cultural matters in print, broadcast and online media, in 2018 he received the Australian Sociological Association Distinguished Service to Sociology Award.

Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity, Institute for Culture and Society

Paul James is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Institute for Culture and Society at the Western Sydney University. He is Scientific Advisor to the Mayor of Berlin, and a Metropolis Ambassador of Urban Innovation. He is an editor of Arena Journal and author or editor of over 30 books including Globalization Matters: Engaging the Global in Unsettled Times (with Manfred Steger, Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Globalism, Nationalism, Tribalism (Sage, 2006). Other books include 16 volumes mapping the field of globalization (Sage). That collection is the most comprehensive and systematic representation of the field of globalization studies, comprising 7,000 pages or 3.5 million words. He has been an advisor to a number of agencies and governments including the Canadian Prime Minister’s G20 Forum, and the Commission on Reception, Truth and Reconciliation in East Timor. His work for the Papua New Guinea Minister for Community Development became the basis for their Integrated Community Development Policy. From 2007 till 2014 he was Director of the United Nations agency, the Global Compact Cities Programme.