Culture Matters: Cuts and Resistance

Author(s):  
Ingrid von Rosenberg

The chapter focuses on the cuts administered since 2010 in the fields of literature, music, visual arts, film and performing arts, and their teaching to the young. Budget constraints have led to the closure of numerous essential institutions, such as theatres, libraries and youth centres, museums and art galleries. The chapter looks at significant sectors and examines the social consequences of their financial losses, starting with the relatively modest cuts for prestigious national institutions and the ‘creative industries’ and moving on to the disastrously major ones for the local councils and the Arts Council England. Forms of resistance are analysed as a means to reclaim cultural agency, ranging from grass-root activities to Labour Party opposition. In several cases volunteers and philanthropists have stepped in to keep institutions running, while individual celebrities and political groups have publicly voiced protest, sometimes with spectacular actions.

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 43
Author(s):  
Nurdien Harry Kistanto

The traditional and popular artists have their fans, who are associated with levels of society and socio-economic conditions of the artists. Most artists appreciate the arts as a forum for the fulfillment of subsistence and some other artists treat art not merely as the main work in making a living, but as self-actualization and calling in life. Democratization, way of life & lifestyle have encouraged and accelerated development of new traditions in the arts; industrialization that took place since the early 1970s emphasized the political, policy and strategy choices of economy, trade and commercial business and service-based industries, which are very influential on the lives of the type, variety and artistic tastes. Deployment mode of art with industry and trade system applies to the popular performing arts, both departing from the tradition of Java and the growing management and modern technology, which supported the creation and innovation. With such developments, the traditional artists tend to be marginalized and subsistence efforts to meet with arts performances tend to be unprofitable, while popular artists through the art of business and trade industries tend to prosper. This research, among others, find authentic evidence from the field to confirm the truth of these allegations carefully, so that building theory and the concept of "the efforts of traditional and popular artists in the fulfillment of living life" is a field-based, not based on theory and concepts of the social and cultural sciences - called grand theory. In addition to utilizing the resources of media such as newspapers, magazines and internet websites, techniques of field observation and interviews, as well as in-depth interviews, which are commonly used in qualitative research, the mainstay of this research data collection.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 272-283
Author(s):  
Rachel Delta Higdon ◽  
Kate Chapman

This article focuses specifically on drama and theatre higher education (HE) programmes and preparation for potential graduate work. The article investigates working in the creative industries and in the performing arts (particularly within acting) and how HE students in the United Kingdom prepare for this life. The growth of the creative industries and successful applied drama in the public and private sectors has also brought business interest in how drama and theatre processes can benefit other workplaces, outside of the creative arts. The article addresses current policy, initiatives and partnerships to broaden inclusion and access to creative work. The research explores drama undergraduate degrees and the university’s role in supporting a successful transition from HE to graduate work. Students perceive the university world as safe and the graduate world as precarious and unsafe. The research findings have resonance with other undergraduate degrees, outside of the arts and the role the university plays in student transitions from the university to the graduate environment.


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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Ayse Collins ◽  
Ruth Rentschler ◽  
Karen Williams ◽  
Fara Azmat

Abstract Although the potential of arts to promote social inclusion is recognised, barriers to social inclusion for disabled people in the arts is under-researched. Based on 34 semi-structured interviews with disabled people and those without disability from four arts organisations in Australia, the paper identifies barriers for social inclusion for disabled people within performing arts across four dimensions: access; participation; representation and empowerment. Findings highlight barriers are societal, being created with little awareness of needs of disabled people, supporting the social model of disability. Findings have implications beyond social inclusion of disabled people within the arts, demonstrating how the arts can empower disabled people and enable them to access, participate and represent themselves and have a voice. Our framework conceptualises these four barriers for social inclusion for disabled people for management to change.


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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius

Muslim presence in Lithuania, though already addressed from many angles, has not hitherto been approached from either the perspective of the social contract theories or of the compliance with Muslim jurisprudence. The author argues that through choice of non-Muslim Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their adopted Motherland, Muslim Tatars effectively entered into a unique (yet, from the point of Hanafi fiqh, arguably Islamically valid) social contract with the non-Muslim state and society. The article follows the development of this social contract since its inception in the fourteenth century all the way into the nation-state of Lithuania that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century and continues until the present. The epitome of the social contract under investigation is the official granting in 1995 to Muslim Tatars of a status of one of the nine traditional faiths in Lithuania with all the ensuing political, legal and social consequences for both the Muslim minority and the state.


Author(s):  
Ali Hussein Kadhim Alesammi

Since 2010 Middle East have many events or what they call "Arab spring events" which it result of overthrow governments and the rise of new political groups, all of this elements was resulting of many international and regional activities and making new regional and international axles, as well as the intersections of the different regional interests, therefore this research will try to study the stability and instability in the region as an independent variable not according to the neorealism or neoliberalism theories, but according to the constructivism theory which it base their assumptions on:  "In the international relations the non-physical structures of international interactions are determined by the identities of the players, which in turn determine the interests that determine the behavior of international players." So the research questions are: 1-What is the identity policy and haw affect in international relations? 2-How the social construct affect in international relations? 3-How the elite's identities for the main actors in the Middle East affect in the regional axles?  


2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-53
Author(s):  
Anna Marazuela Kim

While creative placemaking has proved a long-standing paradigm for the arts in city-making strategy, recently there has been a shift towards a cultural infrastructure approach. This article takes critical stock of this paradigm shift, to engage the broader question of whether we can design for culture in the built environment. Conceptualizing creative placemaking within a larger genealogical framework, I argue that this shift might be understood as responsive to some of the limitations and unintended social consequences of the movement: its temporal nature and contribution to cycles of gentrification and displacement.


Author(s):  
Rebecca Colesworthy

Chapter 1 takes a cue from recent anthropologists who have stressed the influence of Mauss’s socialism on his sociological work. Returning to Mauss’s The Gift, the chapter argues that what links his essay to the experimental writing of his literary contemporaries is not their shared fascination with the primitive, as other critics have suggested, but rather their shared investment in reimagining social possibilities within market society. Mauss was, as his biographer notes, an “Anglophile.” Shedding light on his admiration of British socialism and especially the work of Beatrice and Sidney Webb—friends of Virginia and Leonard Woolf—as well as competing usages of the language of “gifts” in the social sciences and the arts, the chapter ultimately provides a new material and conceptual framework for understanding the intersection of largely French gift theory and Anglo-American modernist writing.


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