The conference framework is something like a grid, with the three themes:
Looked at through two lenses
What is it about particular people, groups, communities and places that enable them to be resilient? What’s the relationship between resilience and sustainability? These panels will discuss these questions and more, creatively redefining resilience for the 21st century.
View sessions in the Resilient People, Strong Communities theme
What is an environmentally sustainable arts practice and how can local governments, communities and artists work together to achieve this? What new models and partnerships assist us to maintain an environmentally sustainable arts and cultural practice? These panels will shed light onto how the arts and culture can play creative and significant roles in creating awareness of and achieving environmental sustainability.
View sessions in the Our Responsibility / Environmental Sustainability theme
What could we all be doing and thinking about differently? These panels will help you understand the nature and variety of impacts that affect or support you and your community’s creativity and art making with a nod to the past and a view to the future.
View sessions in the Organisations, Policies, Partnerships and Future Models theme
With the role out of the NBN over the next decade we thought we would use Kumuwuki / Big Wave to help map where this nation is in creating healthy and dynamic digital communities. These panels will give you an insight into how digital cultures/platforms are supporting different practices, new art forms and assisting to build resilient people and strong communities?
The Emerging Digital Culture lens is co-presented by Freerange Future
View sessions in the Emerging Digital Culture lens
We thought we would use Kumuwuki / Big Wave to help define a new term “cultural leadership”. How is it forging new thinking around environmental responsibilities and sustainability? And how do cultural leaders deal with uncertainty? By telling us what’s working and what is not working, revealing their failures, and learnings, artists, local governments and communities, will discuss the important qualities of cultural leadership and resilience that we need to practice.
View sessions in the Cultural Leadership lens
There is no doubt about it regional communities are confronting rapid, complex and multifaceted change.
Goolwa, the site of the 2012 Regional Arts Australia National Conference is no exception. A quiet little seaside / riverside town it is part of the Murray Darling Basin and sits at the mouth of the mighty Murray, a place where you can witness the evidence, if you ever needed it, of the importance of sound environmental policy. It is the home and the land of the Ngarrindjeri Nation. It is also where Colin Thiele’s ‘Storm Boy’ grew up and befriended Mr Percival.
Over the past couple of years people have become interested in the idea of resilience. Like it or not it is often used to describe regional communities and people. Resilience is a quality, a way of describing, identifying or thinking about why some people, organisations or communities seem to ride the waves of change, survive and even thrive whilst others struggle.
Resilience is contextual and dynamic; we know it involves impact, response, and outcomes. What does resilience look like in your context?
The roll out of the National Broadband Network (NBN) is a prime example of the kind of multifaceted change that has huge implications for regional centres. It is both a challenge and an opportunity. It exemplifies how within this impact there is threat, yet is itself the kernel of new and creative responses. What does resilience look like with the NBN?
This raises the question; where do arts and cultural practices feature in terms of this theme of resilience? Is it simply about adaptation and response or is it about cultural leadership, us taking the reins and redefining the nature of community, the environment and the organisational policies we work with? Who are the people exploring this complexity?
By exploring all of these questions and drawing on the wealth of experience in regional Australia we will be imagining new and different futures in 2012. We will grow our understanding of where creativity and art can play a role in the many different forms of resilience by featuring the most innovative examples taking place across the national regional landscape.
