The work of culture and C-19 (original) (raw)

Culture in Times of COVID-19: Resilience, Recovery and Revival

2022

The culture sector faces a time of great change after weathering the global challenges wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the destructive wake of lost livelihoods and revenue, this report provides a first global assessment of the pandemic's varying impacts across sub-sectors and regions, and presents an integrated policy framework to support the recovery of the sector. Advocating for a paradigm shift in the governance of culture to bolster its resilience and sustainability, the report sets forth collaborative and multidisciplinary action areas to improve the socioeconomic status of artists and cultural professionals, and to nurture an interconnected ecosystem rooted in cultural diversity and creativity. This system-wide approach is supported by key data that underscores the importance of promoting culture as a public good and protecting equality and opportunity across the entire cultural value chain. Culture in Times of COVID-19: Resilience, Recovery and Revival outlines untapped opportunities for stakeholders across government, civil society, and the private and public sectors, and calls for coordinated efforts to fortify the culture sector, secure its resiliency in the future, and unleash its potential as a driver of sustainable and inclusive development.

Covid-19: The cultural constructions of a global crisis

International Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022

This is the Introduction to the special issue on Covid-19 and the cultural constructions of a global crisis. Contextualizing understandings of the pandemic in relation to the concepts of 'event' and 'crisis', especially to the idea that modernity is itself a condition of perpetual crisis, it proposes that the pandemic is a crisis-event that catalyses new possibilities for making visible endemic inequalities and injustices across highly variable cultural and social domains, from the personal to the global. Always open to containment and appropriation, this crisis of visibility and invisibility is discussed as it pertains to the body, to space and social proximity, and to media and mediation. The individual contributions to the special issue are introduced in relation to these topics.

Cultural chronicles of COVID-19, part 2: politics and praxis

Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2022

This is the final instalment of a two-part forum series titled Cultural Chronicles of COVID-19, edited by Marina Levina. In part 1, the forum focussed on the role of language in shaping cultural response to the pandemic. The second part of the forum engages with the United States and global politics surrounding COVID-19. The authors focus on race, disability, colonialism, and public health to examine how politics are conducted during the pandemic.

Cultural Resistance To Covid-19

2020

In the present pandemia situation, new solutions must be found, to overcame the impact of the Covid-19. This text discusses two of those collective answers: 1. Socio-cultural resistance movements organized by art professionals and their publics. 2. A practical knowledge instrument for such action. One of the most relevant publics of public art is the cultural tourist. In this articulation between a social activity and an agent, a practical sociological objective lies in the construction of concrete tools for clarifying public art applied to tourism activities. For example, in the form of an Encyclopedia of Public Art, which can be useful for various agents involved in both the cultural world of public art and in the social universe of tourism. These public art’s agents or publics, and tourist audiences, include researchers, teachers, students, travel agencies, museums, galleries and other institutions, NGOs, cultural associations, as well as tourists, citizens and immigrants. For th...

Culture as care: Argentina’s cultural policy response to Covid-19

Cultural Trends, 2020

This article analyses cultural policy responses to Covid-19 in Argentina with a focus on the matter of care. It asks: What actions is the government taking in order to care for cultural organisations, cultural workers and the communities they serve? What local understandings of culture underpin such policy decisions? And finally, what have been the results and responses to such policies so far? In order to answer these questions we focus mainly on a central programme of the National Ministry of Culture, Puntos de Cultura [Points of Culture], which provides support to community cultural projects. As a notable, institutionalised example of the Latin American tradition of community arts, a focus on Puntos de Cultura provides an entry point to Latin American perspectives on the social and caring role of culture, thus allowing a contextualised analysis of culture and care at a time of crisis.

“A Plague upon Your Howling”: art and culture in the viral emergency

Cultural Trends

In this introduction, we outline the context for the international emergence of cultural policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our article first offers a general account of how arts and culture have been affected by the pandemic, before looking at some of the state interventions (bailouts') to support the professional sector, and the present and future conditions they might be seeking to preserve or occasion. We then examine the UK as a particular case study. In rejecting a politics of "bailout" and "return", and in synchrony with others seeking to situate culture in a re-vitalised political economy, we argue that professional arts and culture needs to move forward with a "new deal" in hand; one that can enhance culture's potential and multipart value, as well as help the sector progressively engage with the many social, economic and environmental challenges ahead and beyond C-19. KEYWORDS Art and culture; green new deal; cultural policy; Covid-19; cultural work Before the deluge The COVID-19 pandemic is global, but the globe is not homogenous. Whilst we all recognise the signs from the newsfeedslockdowns, flattening curves, flat-out medical services, first and second waves, disrupted travel, disrupted employment, masking/notmasking, solidarities/ scapegoatingthese are refracted through very different political-cultural configurations. Readers will no doubt be all too familiar with the immediate and devastating impact of the crisis on the arts and cultural sector, and the wide range of responses (or not) by governments, and by various actors from the sector itself, across the globe. This Special Issue can only be a highly selective set of snapshots on the run. Written in August, by the time it is published things will have moved on. Perhaps "snapshot" is the wrong metaphor; these are diagnostics, aetiologies, tentative prognoses. For what this crisis is illuminating, in all-too-lurid detail, is how we think about and value art and culture; how we argue for their importance; how governments and public policy actors understand and value them, what they are prepared to do, on what grounds and with what capacity. In this Special Issue, we provide a selection of national and regional accounts, outlining how professional arts and culture have been affected by the crisis, some of the state

Covid-19 as cultural trauma

American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 2020

This paper has two aims. The first is to introduce the concept of compressed cultural trauma, and the second is to apply the theory of cultural trauma in two case studies of the current covid-19 pandemic, Greece and Sweden. Our central question is whether the pandemic will evolve into a cultural trauma in these two countries. We believe the pandemic presents a challenge to cultural trauma theory, which the idea of compressed trauma is meant to address. We conclude that, while the ongoing covid-19 pandemic has had traumatic consequences in Sweden and Greece, it has not evolved into cultural trauma in either country.