scholarly journals Cultural Ecology and Cultural Critique

Arts ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rowan Bailey ◽  
Claire Booth-Kurpnieks ◽  
Kath Davies ◽  
Ioanni Delsante
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Think Tank ◽  
Place Studies ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Policy Information

In 2015, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) commissioned John Holden, visiting professor at City University, London, and associate at the think-tank Demos, to write a report on culture as part of its Cultural Value Project. The claim within the report was to redirect culture away from economic prescriptions and to focus on ecological approaches to ‘value’. Holden considers the application and use of ecological tropes to re-situate culture as ‘non-hierarchical’ and as part of symbiotic social processes. By embracing metaphors of ‘emergence,’ ‘interdependence,’ ‘networks,’ and ‘convergence,’ he suggests we can “gain new understandings about how culture works, and these understandings in turn help with policy information and implementation”. This article addresses the role of ‘cultural critique’ in the live environments and ecologies of place-making. It will consider, with examples, how cultural production, cultural practices, and cultural forms generate mixed ecologies of relations between aesthetic, psychic, economic, political, and ethical materialisms. With reference to a body of situated knowledges, derived from place studies to eco-regionalisms, urban to art criticisms, we will consider ecological thinking as a new mode of cultural critique for initiating arts and cultural policy change. Primarily, the operant concept of ‘environing’ will be considered as the condition of possibility for the space of critique. This includes necessary and strategic actions, where mixed ecologies of cultural activity work against the disciplinary policing of space with new assemblages of distributed power

Cultural policy and participatory art practices in Flanders

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kris Rutten ◽  
Helena Calleeuw ◽  
Griet Roets ◽  
Angelo Van Gorp
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Policy Framework ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
Politics Of Resistance ◽  
Art Organizations

Purpose In Flanders, the subventions in the cultural sector are mainly divided and decided upon within the framework of the Arts Decree. Within this policy framework, art organizations may choose in their funding applications for “participation” as one of the five possible functions to describe their artistic and cultural practices. However, questions need to be raised about the different interpretations of the notion of participation within this policy framework. The growing trend of evidence-based policy-making implies that participation risks to become a “target” that needs to be achieved instrumentally, which paradoxically ignores the fact that participatory practices within culture and the arts are very often diverse, multi-layered and context-specific practices. Starting from this paradox, the purpose of this paper is to explore how the current policy framework is translated into different “participatory” art practices by art organizations and specifically how cultural practitioners themselves conceptualize it. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the authors discuss the results of a qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews with cultural practitioners about how they grapple with the notion of participation within their organizations and practices. Findings The results clearly show that practitioners use micro-politics of resistance to deal with different, and often conflicting, conceptualizations of participation in relation to this cultural policy framework. Research limitations/implications The implications of the findings are vital for the discussion about cultural policy. These micro-politics of resistance do not only have an impact on the development of individual participatory art practices but also on the broader participatory arts landscape and on how the function of participation is perceived within the renewed policy framework. Originality/value The original contribution of this paper is to explore the perspective of practitioners in cultural organizations about the function of participation in the Arts Decree in Flanders and specifically how the notion of participation is operationalized in their practices in relation to this cultural policy framework.

Cultural Policies of the Chávez Government

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sujatha Fernandes
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Alternative Conceptions ◽  
Cultural Activity ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
Cultural Movements ◽  
Hugo Chavez

The cultural policies of the left-wing government of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in the new millennium saw a shift back to funding and patronage of the arts after years of defunding and commodification of cultural production. However, despite leading to a renaissance of cultural activity, Chavista cultural policy also retained a modernist rationality that treated cultural production as objects to be classified and quantified. Official cultural policy in Venezuela has historically developed alongside popular-cultural formations that draw on alternative conceptions of culture that stem from everyday life. The official and the everyday have developed in tandem and, sometimes, at cross-purposes. Many scholars look to policies and states as the producers of change, but it is at the level of the everyday that we can see the emerging possibilities that define cultural movements in search of social change.

In the Market's Place: Cultural Policy in Norway

1984 ◽  
Vol 471 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
HANS F. DAHL
Keyword(s):  
Public Good ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Essential Role ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
State Spending ◽  
State Support ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The 1960S

The arts in Norway are considered a public good and are therefore heavily subsidized, in order to make them available to the greatest number of people, to maintain Norway's national cultural standard on a par with neighboring countries, and to keep cultural traditions unbroken by preventing sudden ruptures in cultural production. The criterion for state support is art and its position in the market. The state comes in whenever the market proves insufficient, partly through direct subsidies covering production costs and partly by buying a certain amount of the cultural product. Norway advocates a policy of strong cultural decentralization. Cultural budgets are channeled through the Norwegian Cultural Fund, and individual artists' incomes tend to be a mixture of collective funds and individual royalty incomes, with a gradual shift toward individual incomes, even if still state-derived. State spending on culture has increased since the 1960s, and it has played an essential role in maintaining continuity in the quantity of cultural production, if not always the quality.

“Tradition,” Vernacularism, and Learning to Be a Folk Musician With Social Media

2020 ◽  
pp. 442-466
Author(s):  
Simon Keegan-Phipps ◽  
Lucy Wright
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Folk Music ◽  
Learning Mechanisms ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Shaping

This chapter considers the role of social media (broadly conceived) in the learning experiences of folk musicians in the Anglophone West. The chapter draws on the findings of the Digital Folk project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), and begins by summarizing and problematizing the nature of learning as a concept in the folk music context. It briefly explicates the instructive, appropriative, and locative impacts of digital media for folk music learning before exploring in detail two case studies of folk-oriented social media: (1) the phenomenon of abc notation as a transmissive media and (2) the Mudcat Café website as an example of the folk-oriented discussion forum. These case studies are shown to exemplify and illuminate the constructs of traditional transmission and vernacularism as significant influences on the social shaping and deployment of folk-related media technologies. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the need to understand the musical learning process as a culturally performative act and to recognize online learning mechanisms as sites for the (re)negotiation of musical, cultural, local, and personal identities.

scholarly journals Fathoming postnatural oceans: Towards a low trophic theory in the practices of feminist posthumanities

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110285
Author(s):  
Marietta Radomska ◽  
Cecilia Åsberg
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Oil Spills ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Marine Pollution ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
Slow Violence ◽  
Human Care ◽  
Ethical Stance ◽  
The Baltic

As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable biodiversity at a deep time-scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that the oceans are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future societies. Human-induced impacts range from climate change, ocean acidification, loss of biodiversity, eutrophication and marine pollution to local degradation of marine and coastal environments. Such environmental violence takes form of both ‘spectacular’ events, like oil spills and ‘slow violence’, occurring gradually and out of sight. The purpose of this paper is to show four cases of coastal and marine forms of slow violence and to provide counter-accounts of how to reinvent our consumer imaginary at such locations, as well as to develop what is here referred to as ‘low-trophic theory,’ a situated ethical stance that attends to entanglements of consumption, food, violence, environmental adaptability and more-than-human care from the co-existential perspective of multispecies ethics. We combine field-philosophical case studies with insights from marine science, environmental art and cultural practices in the Baltic and North Sea region and feminist posthumanities. The paper shows that the oceanic imaginary is not a unified place, but rather, a set of forces, which requires renewed ethical approaches, conceptual inventiveness and practical creativity. Based on the case studies and examples presented, the authors conclude that the consideration of more-than-human ethical perspectives, provided by environmental arts and humanities is crucial for both research on nature and space, and for the flourishing of local multispecies communities. This paper thus inaugurates thinking and practice along the proposed here ethical stance of low-trophic theory, developed it along the methodological lines of feminist environmental posthumanities.

scholarly journals Redefining peer learning: Role of student entrepreneurs in teaching entrepreneurship in the UK higher education context

2021 ◽  
pp. 095042222110126
Author(s):  
Stella Xu ◽  
Zimu Xu ◽  
Fujia Li ◽  
Arun Sukumar
Keyword(s):  
Student Engagement ◽  
Course Design ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
School Students ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Student Entrepreneurs ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Uk Higher Education

Entrepreneurship-related modules have become increasingly popular over the years, not only among business school students but also among those from other disciplines, including engineering and the arts and humanities. In some circumstances, they are offered as optional modules for students across different faculties and disciplines. While it is beneficial to mix students with different backgrounds, bringing in a wide range of perspectives, there are also challenges relating to course design and student engagement. With these challenges in mind, the authors trialled a new approach in the hope of motivating students from diverse academic and socio-cultural backgrounds to engage more fully in the classroom by utilising student entrepreneurs as guest speakers. The student-centric approach has proved effective in enhancing student engagement, as evidenced by both informal and formal feedback.

scholarly journals Geopoetics: Storytelling against mastery

2021 ◽  
pp. 204382062098639
Author(s):  
Aya Nassar
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World

In this engagement with Eric Magrane’s article, ‘Climate Geopolitics (The Earth is a Composted Poem)’, I follow two provocations: first, geopoetics as travelling through disciplinary turfs, and second, geopoetics as storytelling. Coming from a disciplinary trajectory that spent a long stop at international relations (IR), these provocations attach me to geopoetics as practice and a growing field. My engagement here is oriented to geopoetics not only at the threshold of geography and the arts and humanities, but also the intersections of geography and politics. I primarily propose that viewing geopoetics as an open space for experimenting allows for disrupting masterful understandings of the academic self and counters a univocal, universal narrative of the world.

The Biblioteca Marucelliana and its database of prints and drawings: a work in progress

2010 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 8-12
Author(s):  
Monica Maria Angeli ◽  
Rossella Todros
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Digital Images ◽  
Large Collection ◽  
Work In Progress ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts

The Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence is a library specialising in the arts and humanities that has been open to the general public since the middle of the 18th century. Its founder, Francesco Marucelli, willed his large collection of books to the library. In 1783, the last member of the Marucelli family, Francesco di Roberto Marucelli, left the library around 2500 drawings and 30,000 engravings, and these are now being re-catalogued. The first volume of the engravings can already be consulted on a CD called PRISMA, and the records for the drawings, accompanied by digital images, will be put on a database which it is hoped will be available to scholars worldwide in 2010.

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