Paul Long's research is informed by inter-related areas in his interests and expertise.

Creative Industries and Cultural Policy

He is currently devleoping research that considers the representation in the cultural and creative industries of 'newly-arrived' migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Here, represetation has a two-fold meaning.

i. Attuned to the distinctions between these groups in law, policy and practice, his research is interested in their contribution to a sector which is integral to the future prosperity of post-industrial Australia with ‘‘creative skills and talents of the workforce driving new ideas and change’’ (Attorney-General’s Department et al. 2011, p. 5).

ii. Alongside this economic value, the sector has symbolic purpose in for the nation’s representation to itself and to the world, where a number of broader social challenges are played out. As Colic-Peisker and Karen Farquharson observe of one particular group, ‘structural equality and its crucial element – the employment success of skilled non-English speaking background migrants – is a domain where future multiculturalism will stand or fall’ (2011, 585). 

Media History, Heritage and Archives 

Long is interested in questions about the history of media, exploring a range of forms as sites of historical mediation and the production of ways of thinking about and experiencing the historical. He is thus concerned with the development of 'media historiography' as a distinctive field and, after Hayden White, approaching media forms as part of the repertoire of historical ‘writing’ and indeed its methods. How, why and when have artists, film-makers, journalists, musicians, game makers, and other producers responded to and ‘written’ history? How has this production been consumed and understood? Integral to this approach is an understanding of the central role of media forms to Modernity, its development and historicization, and indeed the emergence of theoretical and everyday concepts of the historical.

Framing much of Long's research is a political economy approach to the mediation of history, locating it in the context of wider field of creative production and exploring what is at stake by asking: who speaks about the past, when, in what forms and about what issues and with what effect and affects? The political economy approach underwrites Long's approach to the production of histories and role in them as practitioner, focussed in particular on concepts and practices of heritage and archive formation. A practical question then asks: what can one do with media history? In so doing, Long's research attend also to the role of the academy in this economy and to the democratization of the field presented by ideas of Public History. This development is presented by the mediatization of history, of the role of media in heritage practice and the possibilities of the digital turn for vernacular production and critique. Here, a cultural justice ethos and vernacular practice is central to the histories I research and the commitment to public engagement and the impact of Long's work.

Significant archive resources have emerged from the spread of digital technologies to prompt/support Long's research questions. These archives are important as active and community-based projects rather than conventional records of nation and state. Archiving practices have been repositioned within new and participatory online cultures, serving as potential anchors for social and public history and memory studies research, in ways Long seeks to explore further. These archives offer a space in which, again, we might see alternative or ‘new’ histories produced through the contributions of fans and other lay-archivists involved in these communal practices; what and how are these histories, and how are they made? This in turn raises further questions about the online archive: is this evidence of ‘archiving culture’ or simply one facet of the contemporary social world? How does it relate to the offline world? What perspectives do different people bring to the archive, as participants but also as audiences or users? How ‘authentic’ are these archives and the histories that they produce, and what ‘value’ do they have (for History ‘proper’)? And can we consider online archives themselves to be a media form, one output of history as cultural industry?

So, the objects of study that have brought these questions together and which continue to anchor them include: popular music history – particularly the manner in which music forms offer an affective means of encountering ideas and sensibilities of the past; vernacular archives of popular culture; the political economy, policy and affective experience of the archive; the refugee archive; curating popular music history.

I came to Media, Film and Journalism at Monash in November 2019. Prior to this appointment I worked for several years in the Birmingham School of Media at Birmingham City University where, in 2009, I co-founded the Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research.

I completed my doctoral studies in 2001 at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Carolyn Steedman. My PhD. The Aesthetics of Class in Post-War Britain, was examined by Bill Schwartz and James Hinton and resulted in my first book 'Only in the Common People', published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2008.

Prior to this I completed my Master's degree in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. My dissertation, supervised by Michael Green (there at the founding of CCCS in 1964), concerned would-be authors and creative writings groups - a first foray into the exploration of cultural work and field. Birmingham was where I produced the research for my first article on public history and memory in the city, a place where I have lived most of my life and which informs the empirical base for some of my research and public activities.

I should mention that I read Film and Literature at the University of Warwick, a subject influenced by a number of graduates of the CCCS whose creative enthusiasm and commitment to their subject and its value has impelled my own approach ever since even as it has moved beyond a concern with film and a focus on the text. 

I am interested in original proposals concerning the nature of creative work across all aspects of the cultural sector (and at all levels of input into it from singer to roadie to accountant), in its contemporary and historical form and in relation to the particular character of locality, space and place. I would like to hear about research interested in how creative workers develop and maintain their skills, ambition and indeed confidence and place in the field, of how they understand concepts of creativity, talent and indeed the nature of culture.

I am particularly interested in research focussed on the role of migrants and refugees in the cultural economy and aspects of cultural intermediation and creative pedagogy as it relates to policy directives or the absence thereof.

Proposals concerning media and cultural heritage, archives and histories - authorised, unauthorised and DIY are welcome. I'm interested in the political economy and practice of this field with a particular interest in the impulse of popular history.