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Australia is currently rolling out one of the most expensive and ambitious infrastructure projects in the nation’s history. The National Broadband Network is promoted as a catalyst for far-reaching changes in Australia’s economy, governmental service provision, society and culture. However, it is evident that desired dividends, such as greater social engagement, enhanced cultural awareness and increased civic and political participation, do not flow automatically from mere technical connection to the network. This article argues that public institutions play a vital role in redistributing technological capacity to enable emerging forms of social and cultural participation. In particular, we examine public libraries as significant but often overlooked sites in the evolving dynamic between digital technology, new cultural practices and social relations. Drawing on interviews and fieldwork across the public library network of the state of Queensland, we attend to the strategies and approaches libraries are adopting in response to a digital culture.

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Currently, a discourse of decline shadows multiculturalism, claiming it is 'no longer' viable as a governmental technique to manage present-day social complexity. This article revisits multiculturalism as an intervention in the discourse of decline, shifting the terms of the multiculturalism debate from the abstract struggle between competing political ideologies, to the minor material processes through which multiculturalism was enacted. Through a Foucauldian analytics of governmentality, we examine in particular the invention and evolution of multicultural arts over the last 30 years. We attend to the multiple ways in which cultural difference has been mobilised and understood by policy-makers and the constituents they served; how these various framings of cultural difference informed the shifting objectives and constituencies of multicultural arts; and how these shifts were influenced by the dispersed nature of policy formation, crossing multiple sites and stakeholders, each subject to, but also resisting and reshaping, the discursive parameters of this category. Such an approach dismantles the coherence and stability of multiculturalism upon which the discourse of decline is premised, but also anticipates the way multiculturalism is presently transforming in response to a transnational, neoliberal cultural imaginary.

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