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The rise of arts and culture is transforming citizen politics. Though new to many social scientists, this is a commonplace for many policy makers. We seek to overcome this divide by joining culture and the arts with classic concepts of political analysis. We offer an analytical framework incorporating the politics of cultural policy alongside the typical political and economic concerns. Our framework synthesizes several research streams that combine in global factors driving the articulation of culture into political/economic processes. The contexts of Toronto and Chicago are explored as both enhanced the arts dramatically, but Toronto engaged artists qua citizens, while Chicago did not.

This chapter serves as the introduction to the edited collection, calling into focus the diverse ways in which ‘Australia’ is asserted in the spaces, scenes and practices of Australian heavy metal. This chapter responds to earlier quandaries in the sparse research on Australian metal which question if there is anything definitively ‘Australian’ about the characteristics, themes and narratives demonstrated within Australian heavy metal scenes. In response to this challenge, the author uses this chapter to establish critical foundations for addressing how Australianness has been represented ‘Downunderground’ (Phillipov, 2008, p. 215) – historically, musically and geographically, as work in this collection affirms. This introduction foregrounds the concerns of the edited collection at large, which addresses how national identity has been imagined and constructed in ways which can at once celebrate problematic patriarchal nationalist symbolism, yet also call into focus the resistant and subversive ways in which metal scenes have deconstructed, critiqued and renegotiated the parameters of what it means to be ‘Australian’. This chapter asserts that any interrogation of the ‘Australianness’ of Australian metal must problematise the notion of a singularly ‘Australian’ identity in the first instance. Here the author argues that ‘Australian metal’ as a consolidated signifier must be problematised to instead come to an understanding of the multisited ways in which ‘Australianness’ is experienced within scenes. In doing so the author establishes the critical trajectories for the edited collection at large – to track the genealogies of Australian metal as a component in a wider global scene, and consider the plurality of its contemporary manifestations.

In this paper I reflected on managing my emotions during a study I conducted of the police in Brussels which consisted mainly in observation. Emotions became problematic because on the one hand, I tried to restrict my observer’s role and did not wish to intervene in the work of those I observed. On the other hand, within my family, friends, or colleagues the issue of police practices sparked emotionally tense discussions because of negative experiences some of them had had with the police. How could I maintain a distance from all the emotion “in” the field and “out” of the field? How could I manage this uncomfortable situation? This paper is based on material from an observation carried out between October 2010 and November 2011 in the context of my doctoral thesis: Police Officers and Youth: the Social Organization of Interactions in Public Space. This paper will not address questions about police officers because the focus is my research experience while remaining relatively involved in my daily social life as a young mixed-race woman in her thirties. I realized that fieldwork consists in a learning-by-doing process and that I had to abandon my confidence in the positivistic ideal of the rational and distant observer who has a full control over herself in the situation under study. The researcher’s challenge is to use her emotions knowingly.

In jam festival music scenes, participants build elaborate networks that connect members formally and informally between music events. Largely regional in scope, participants form these networks to develop and perform scene identities and cultivate intimate social relationships. Emerging through cultivated “crews” and “camps,” members build hubs of interaction that sustain and persist well beyond the festival event to create a vital sense of belonging and place. While the affective relationships formed at music festival events tend to be temporary, diffuse, and episodic, scene networks provide a “portable” interactional infrastructure that promotes relational continuity and persistence. These networks also provide more pragmatic benefits to networked members in the form of social and subcultural capital exchanged for symbolic and material rewards within the scene. Drawing from nearly 20 years of formal and informal participant observation in festival scenes, I provide an analysis of these networks and articulate common practices that drive their formation and continuation.

In this chapter, the author considers how Melbourne’s grindcore metal scene produces itself as coherent, authentic and masculine through the discursive positioning of Sydney’s scene as lacking, inauthentic and feminine and/or homosexual. The way Melbourne scene-members talk about Sydney in ethnographic interviews and online, indicates how Melbourne’s grindcore scene identity rests on a particular striving towards – and fantasy of – a bounded, comprehensible masculine identity anchored in Symbolic/linguistic signifiers of homophobia. Building on my previous research on Melbourne’s scene, the author utilises a Lacanian perspective to argue that the masculinist talk of Melbournians works as a response to the affective experience of enjoying grindcore music. Here, the author departs from my earlier work, where the author used Deleuzian/Massumian understandings of affect to suggest that affect works to construct community belonging in grindcore scenes (2014). Instead, the author uses Lacan’s approach to affect to suggest that Melbourne grindcore fans construct their identity via furiously producing a fantasy of Sydney fans as ‘Other’. They Symbolically construct Sydney as a ‘cultural wasteland’ populated by ‘poofter[s]’ (Melbourne Grind Syndicate, 2016) who are imagined, and positioned as, inauthentic due to their affective enthusiasm for grindcore. Here, affect works to exclude and Other grindcore fans rather than as a force for collectivity.

This study extends work from home (WFH) literature by recasting WFH performances that emphasise agents’ manipulation of scene. Drawing on the dramatist paradigm, the study uses Burke’s pentadic criticism to code the social media application Pinterest’s ‘work from home’ and ‘home office’ pinboards for act, agent, agency, scene, and purpose. Pinterest is a social media application that users post pins (images with verbal tags and link to external sites, especially blog sites) and collect pins by subject on an electronic pinboard, which other users can like, follow, and share. Analysis of WFH pins reveals that the agent–scene ratio saturates pins emphasising the agency of WFH agents to control their scenes or home office spaces. The idealism of the agent–scene ratio in pins further demonstrates an unrealistic approach to popular culture’s shift to WFH and a romanticisation of WFH as idyllic working conditions. Scripts for employees and employers are explored to equip them with the rhetorical resources to more closely align their agent–scene ideals with the scene–agent realities.

I suggest sociality depends on affective encounters between individuals in particular spaces.

Through an ethnography of Melbourne's grindcore death-metal scene, I examine how belonging in a music scene is constituted by scene members’ affective encounters. In particular, I suggest that a “brutal” disposition is necessary for cultivating the affective intensities necessary for experiencing belonging in the scene. Using scene members’ own understandings of “brutal” I shift from iconic representations of “brutality,” common in other metal scenes, toward a brutal affect. Here, brutality is experienced as a set of embodied intensities, difficult to articulate, but crucial to understanding how scene members cultivate belonging – in the grindcore scene, and in scenic spaces.

The analysis of cultural consumption centers on the influence of individual characteristics (mainly social class). However, this chapter proposes that this relationship is contextual. More specifically, this relationship varies according to the nature of local cultural scenes where people live. In order to show the contextual impact of cultural scenes, we analyze a representative survey among a Spanish population. Three main conclusions are drawn. First, two main dimensions explain the patterns of cultural consumption by the Spanish population: the classical distinction between popular and high culture, and the distinction between conventional and unconventional cultural practices. Second, other characteristics, beside social class, are important to explain the implication of population in different patterns of cultural consumption, for instance, age; young people are oriented toward more unconventional practices regardless of their social class. Third, local cultural scenes matter: the difference between cultural practices of different groups (for instance, young and old people) is reduced in municipalities oriented toward unconventionality, showing an “assimilation contextual effect.” This contextual effect also has some impact upon local cultural policies that we mention briefly.

The analysis of lifestyles and cultural consumption has focused mainly on determining the impact of individual attributes on the types of practices developed by individuals. However, the effect of the access or exposure to certain opportunities of cultural consumption is less frequently analyzed, or even whether this exposure has different effects according to different social groups. The analysis of this issue is one of the objectives of the “Cultural Scene” research program, which is being developed under the project “Cultural Dynamics of Cities.” In this chapter, we try to determine whether existing cultural scenes in different municipalities influence how Spanish residents develop their cultural practices, with data from a nationally representative survey.