scholarly journals From STEM to PAVAM: A unified arts strategy for innovation, industrial and regional policy

2021 ◽  
pp. 095042222110440
Author(s):  
Henry Etzkowitz ◽  
Leila Maria Kehl ◽  
Tatiana Schofield

The potential of the arts and sciences for economic and social development is under conceptualized. However, the recent development of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), justifying increased support for training in the sciences, shows a parallel pathway forward for the arts. The arts are increasingly relevant to the economy, amenable to policy influence as well as an area of human activity in their own right. The authors posit a unified arts framework: PAVAM (performing arts, visual arts, and music), complementing STEM as the basis for a strategy of arts-based interdisciplinary “industrial” policy making. The growing salience of the arts as an industrial sector in the UK and USA is shown. By identifying sources and pathways of value creation from the arts, clear entry points for policy action become identifiable to promote innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development. Comparative case studies suggest a typology of the arts’ potential as sources of creativity, innovation, and regional economic development.

Author(s):  
Eckhard Kessler

The Renaissance Italian Girolamo Cardano is famous for his colourful personality, as well as for his work in medicine and mathematics, and indeed in almost all the arts and sciences. He was an eclectic philosopher, and one of the founders of the so-called new philosophy of nature developed in the sixteenth century. He used both the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic traditions as starting points, and following the medical paradigm of organic being, he transformed the traditional Aristotelian universe into an animated universe in which, thanks to their organic functional order, all individual parts strive towards the conservation both of themselves and of the whole universe. As a result, they can be subjected to a functional analysis. In his more casual writings on moral philosophy, Cardano showed his orientation to be basically Stoic.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hei Wan Mak ◽  
Meg Fluharty ◽  
Daisy Fancourt

Objectives. The global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 heavily affected the arts and creative industries due to the instigation of lockdown measures in the UK and closure of venues. However, it also provided new opportunities for arts and cultural engagement through virtual activities and streamed performances. Yet it remains unclear (i) who was likely to engage with the arts at home during lockdown, (ii) how this engagement differed from patterns of arts engagement prior to COVID-19, and (iii) whether home-based arts engagement was related to people’s ability to cope with their emotions during lockdown. This study was therefore designed to address these questions. Methods. We used data collected in late May from the UK COVID-19 Social Study run by University College London. Multivariate regressions were used for the analysis (N=19,384). Identified confounders included demographic factors, socio-economic position, psychosocial wellbeing and health conditions, adverse events/worries, and coping styles.Results. Four types of home-based arts engagement were identified during the COVID-19 pandemic: digital arts & writing, performing arts, crafts, and reading for pleasure. Our results show that the strongest predictors of the engagement were age, education levels, social support, social network size, and trait emotion-focused or supportive coping styles. In particular, younger adults (aged 18-29), non-keyworkers, people with greater social support, and those with a trait emotion-focused coping style were more likely to have increased arts engagement during lockdown. Arts activities were used as approach and avoidance strategies to help cope with emotions, as well as to help improve self-development. Conclusions. Overall, our study suggests that some people who engaged in the arts during the COVID-19 pandemic were those who typically engage under normal circumstances. However, there were also some heterogeneity across social, cultural and economic groups when comparing normal circumstances and the pandemic. Additionally, this study highlights the value of the arts as coping tools during stressful situations.


2007 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
FRANCESCA BORGONOVI

Participation and attendance in the arts can foster social capital, economic regeneration and skill acquisition. For these reasons, encouraging greater arts participation and attendance among disadvantaged groups became part of the New Labour strategy to promote neighbourhood renewal and tackle social exclusion. It is, however, far from clear what policies are best suited to achieve the aim of greater involvement in the arts. One policy option is to award subsidies to lower admission fees. Using 14 years of data from the UK Family Expenditure Survey, the article examines whether lower prices stimulate attendance at live performances overall and among low-income groups in particular. Findings indicate that while ticket prices influence attendance generally, the response of different income groups is similar, with a 10 per cent increase in price accompanied by a 9 per cent drop in demand. This means that, while price controls may be effective in increasing overall attendance levels among all groups in the population, including among low-income groups, they may not prove adequate whenever the main aim is to reduce the gap in participation across social groups.


2020 ◽  
pp. 84-107
Author(s):  
Vera Borges ◽  
Luísa Veloso

In the wake of the 2008 global financial and economic crisis, new forms of work organization emerged in Europe. Following this trend, Portugal has undergone a reconfiguration of its artistic organizations. In the performing arts, some organiza-tions seem to have crystalized and others are reinventing their artistic mission. They follow a plurality of organizational patterns and resilient profiles framed by cyclical, structural and occupational changes. Artistic organizations have had to adopt new models of work and seek new opportunities to try out alternatives in order to deal, namely, with the constraints of the labour market. The article anal-yses some of the restructuring processes taking place in three Portuguese artistic organizations, focusing on their contexts, individual trajectories and collective missions for adapting to contemporary challenges of work in the arts. We conclude that organizations are a key domain for understanding the changes taking place.


2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-143
Author(s):  
Alison Frater

Starting with a personal perspective this piece outlines the place and role of the arts in the criminal justice system in the UK. It paints an optimistic picture, though an unsettling one, because the imagination and reflexiveness of the arts reveals a great deal about the causes of crime and the consequences of incarceration. It raises questions about the transforming impact of the arts: how the benefits could, and should, be optimised and why evaluations of arts interventions are consistent in identifying the need for a non-coercive, more socially focused, paradigm for rehabilitation. It concludes that the deeper the arts are embedded in the criminal justice system the greater the benefits will be, that a more interdisciplinary approach would support better theoretical understanding, and that increased capacity to deliver arts in the criminal justice system is needed to offer more people a creative pathway out of crime.


Author(s):  
Daisy Fancourt

In recent decades, there has been an increasing number of national policy and strategy papers discussing arts in health in countries around the world. Some of this activity has been driven by national arts bodies, championing the value of the arts in health and wellbeing and advocating for their inclusion within core arts funding and practice. Other activity has been led by health bodies, including health departments within governments and health services themselves. This chapter explores some of the most influential documents and considers their implication for research and practice. It draws on case studies of activity within Ireland, the UK, the USA, Australia, and Nordic countries.


Author(s):  
Tom McLeish

‘I could not see any place in science for my creativity or imagination’, was the explanation, of a bright school leaver to the author, of why she had abandoned all study of science. Yet as any scientist knows, the imagination is essential to the immense task of re-creating a shared model of nature from the scale of the cosmos, through biological complexity, to the smallest subatomic structures. Encounters like that one inspired this book, which takes a journey through the creative process in the arts as well as sciences. Visiting great creative people of the past, it also draws on personal accounts of scientists, artists, mathematicians, writers, and musicians today to explore the commonalities and differences in creation. Tom McLeish finds that the ‘Two Cultures’ division between the arts and the sciences is not after all, the best classification of creative processes, for all creation calls on the power of the imagination within the constraints of form. Instead, the three modes of visual, textual, and abstract imagination have woven the stories of the arts and sciences together, but using different tools. As well as panoramic assessments of creativity, calling on ideas from the ancient world, medieval thought, and twentieth-century philosophy and theology, The Poetry and Music of Science illustrates its emerging story by specific close-up explorations of musical (Schumann), literary (James, Woolf, Goethe) mathematical (Wiles), and scientific (Humboldt, Einstein) creation. The book concludes by asking how creativity contributes to what it means to be human.


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