Biography

Susan Luckman is Professor of Culture and Creative Industries, Founding Director of the Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre (CP3), and the Cultural and Creative Industries Research Platform Leader of the Hawke EU Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence at the University of South Australia.

Susan is an interdisciplinary cultural studies scholar whose research brings a feminist materialist lens to the study of creative work, with a focus on alternative cultural economies including craft micro-entrepreneurialism, rural and regional creativity, subcultures, and the artisanal, all as enabled by the platform distribution, DIY marketing and ‘how to’ affordances of digital media. Her research into the rise of interest in craft and the handmade as a direct response to, and as enabled by, digital technologies is now highly cited in subsequent studies into the ‘third wave’ of craft. Her research has also focussed of the gendered experience of creative precarity, having been at the forefront of research into the rise of female-dominated creative enterprise and platform economies.

Susan has been a Chief Investigator on 6 ARC and 3 EU awarded projects. Her current research includes the ARC Discovery Projects ‘The Value of Craft Skills to the Future of Making in Australia’ (DP190100349, 2019-2024) which is identifying how the craft skills required to sustain and grow skilled Australian making can be maintained and extended, as well as 'Artisanal Making and the Future of Small-Scale Local Production' (DP220100110, 2022-2025, with Dr Michelle Phillipov, University of Adelaide) which aims to identify the consumer identities, decision-making and sustainable artisanal production models underpinning contemporary demand for locally made goods. Previously, she was Chief Investigator on the 4 year Australian Research Council Discovery Project 'Promoting the Making Self in the Creative Micro-economy’ (2015-2018) which explored how online distribution is changing the environment for operating a creative micro-enterprise and, with it, the opportunities for mobile working lives and the impacts upon the larger relationship between public and private spheres this entails. Susan is currently a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts (2022-2025) and is an expert reviewer for the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission (REA). She is on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Cultural Studies (Q1), Continuum: A Journal of Media and Cultural Studies (Q1), and Australian Feminist Studies (Q2), and is Series Editor of Creative Working Lives book series.

Susan is the author of Craftspeople and Designer Makers in the Contemporary Creative Economy (Open Access - Palgrave 2020), 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 Craft Communities (Bloomsbury 2024), Pathways into Creative Working Lives (Palgrave 2020), The ‘New Normal’ of Working Lives: Critical Studies in Contemporary Work and Employment (Palgrave 2018), Craft Economies (Bloomsbury 2018), and Sonic Synergies: Music, Identity, Technology and Community (Ashgate 2008), and author of over 100 book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles and reports on platform economies, cultural and creative work, craft, creative industries and creative micro-entrepreneurialism.