This paper aims at defining the attributes of a local music scene in the Australian context. The case study is the electronic music scene that started in 1979 alongside the punk rock scene in Brisbane. This scene emerged with a minimal support framework (media, venues and stores) and in the context of a repressive political environment known as the "Police State". At that time, Brisbane was an isolated place and our interviewees compared the city to Manchester (for its disaffected Northerness). This paper studies the factors at different scales (local and transnational) that have shaped the local identity of this music scene and the cross-pollination with other local music scenes. It also analyses how new technologies might have affected the evolution of this local identity in the latter days. This research is based on semi-structured interviews with artists (musicians and music producers) that have been involved in the emergence and evolution of this local scene.

The ‘ediaspora’ is a phenomenon that is defined by the different ways that culture can now be collectively produced online. In many ways, attachments to culture can be recreated and reinvented in the diaspora in different online spaces. This conference paper presents research recently conducted in Brisbane, Australia, that examined the everyday lives of twenty young Indian women and the ways in which they performed their cultural identities in different online spaces, such as Facebook, Instagram, and dating websites. With the aim to contribute to the recent ‘turn’ to emotion in the subdiscipline of young people’s geographies, this conference paper reveals the interconnections between emotions and space in the Indian diaspora. This investigation responds to suggestions that research on transnational identities should concentrate more heavily on the processes through which one negotiates his/her identity, such as through emotional attachments and the ways in which these attachments are expressed. For the young Indian women, online spaces enabled a particular embodiment that is both private and public and produced feelings of both empowerment and restriction. Thus, the paper highlights the young women’s internalised understandings of what it means to be a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Indian girl in the diaspora.

This paper examines the emerging geographies of work enacted in the rise of the digital economy also widely known as the ‘sharing economy’. Starting from a broad definition of ‘platform’ work as paid employment undertaken through a digital intermediary such as an app, this paper engages with three key areas: the (potential for) dispersion of labour beyond national boundaries in terms of online work and implications for example for regulation deeply embedded in national regimes; the rapid and flexible movement of global capital; and the geographies produced through the digital. The latter is evident for example in relation to senses/ experiences of place, the role of scale, and of the power to drive and resist new articulations of geographies of (hyper) exploitation. This is achieved through discourse analysis of representations of UberEats, for example, in particular around resistance. This empirical work is situated in a review of the literature on platform work.

Understanding geographic changes has become an indispensable element in geography education. Describing and analyzing changes in space require spatial thinking skills emphasized in geography curriculum but often pose challenges for secondary school students. This school-based research targets a specific strand of spatial thinking skills and investigates whether students using geospatial technology, such as Google Earth, are able to develop their thinking about spatio-temporal changes. An experiment was conducted in a Singaporean secondary school in which skill development was framed within the formal geography curriculum. It compared the effectiveness of two pedagogical approaches: learning with Google Earth versus traditional instruction without the use of such a technology. Findings indicate that the use of Google Earth significantly increased students' ability to identify spatial and temporal changes and analyse these changes. Qualitative data complemented the results by showing that Google Earth could offer students more opportunities to observe and infer changes, thus facilitating their understanding about the dynamic and the complex nature of changes.