Professor Justin O'Connor

Research interests

•     Contemporary urban cultures
•     Cultural and creative industries
•     Cultural policy
•     Urban regeneration
•     Chinese and East Asian Cultures

Background

Justin O’Connor is Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia and visiting Chair, Department of Humanities, Shanghai Jiaotong University.

Justin was recently appointed as a UNESCO expert on their program: “Strengthening the Governance of Culture in Developing Countries”.

Until September 2008 he was Professor of Cultural Industries at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, where he led an MA in Culture, Creativity and Entrepreneurship. Between 1995 and 2006 he was Director of Manchester Institute for Popular Culture at Manchester Metropolitan University. There he led a joint MA (Polis – European Urban Cultures) between the Free University of Brussels, University of Tilburg and Helsinki School of Art and Design.

Whilst in Manchester he led two ESRC projects on the music industry in Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, and on cultural entrepreneurs in Manchester. He co-organized the first national conference on the Night-Time Economy in Manchester in 1995, and led a cultural strategy for the city’s Northern Quarter.

He was commissioned to conduct an extensive quantitative and qualitative study of the Cultural Production Sector in Manchester, research which led to the establishment of Manchester’s Creative Industries Development Service (CIDS), the UK’s first dedicated local economic development agency for the creative industries, of which he was chair. CIDS also established a number of industry-led network organisations for SMEs in the different sub-sectors of creative industries.

Between 2001-3 Justin was lead academic advisor to Manchester’s Urbis museum of the contemporary city.

Justin also led a partnership project between Manchester, Helsinki and St Petersburg to develop a creative industries strategy for the Russian city. His interest in the developing agenda for the creative industries outside Europe has seen him speak in China, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea and Taiwan. In 2006 he co-organised a conference in Shanghai on Creative Economies, Creative Cities, which came out as a book in 2009.

He completed a literature review on the cultural and creative industries for Creative Partnerships and has just completed a report on the relationship between art and creative industries for the Australia Council. He edited a special edition of the International Journal of Cultural Policy on ‘Creative Industries: Ten years After’ and is preparing a special issue of Culture Unbound on ‘Shanghai Moderne’. He is currently finishing a book – After the Creative Industries: New Urban Cultures.

Justin is leading an ARC linkage project, Creative Clusters, Soft Infrastructure and New Media: Developing Capacity in China and Australia, partnered with Shanghai Jiaotong University, the ‘Creative 100’ cluster (Qingdao) and Arup (Sydney). This is a systematic investigation into the evolving uses of creative clusters in China and Australia, with special reference to the role of social media and urban informatics in urban creative ecosystems. It aims to develop state of the art strategic design and policy guidelines to be used in Shanghai, Qingdao and elsewhere in China.