Gay Hawkins

Professor Gay Hawkins has played a key role in the development of Australian cultural studies as an interdisciplinary and philosophically informed practice of social reflection. Her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees were in sociology but she has worked in the field of cultural and media studies since the 1990s. More recently her work has focussed on science and technology studies. She is recognised for research in three distinct areas: the relations between culture and governance, environmental humanities, and economic sociology, markets and materiality. She brings to this research theoretical and empirical approaches that are concerned with the intersections between everyday cultural and material practices and political processes. In 1993 she published From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: constructing community arts, the first book to examine the emergence and impacts of 'community arts' as a field of governmental action. In 2008 she published a major collaborative study of the development of Australia’s unique Special Broadcasting Service with Professor Ien Ang and Lamia Daboussy. The SBS Story: the challenge of cultural diversity documented the complex processes whereby diversity was made a matter of public representation, interest and debate.