The UK’s ‘third places’ as sites of participation: everyday spaces as the ‘social interstice’ of relational aesthetics (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
and their contributors have done us a profound service by tracing the commodification of Australian cultural policy over the last quarter of a century. Their point of departure, the Federal Government's Creative Nation document, appeared in 1994. It forwarded a vision of the good life that was connected to commerce, but not limited to or by it-mammon was just one influence. Nevertheless, the abiding lesson from this collection is that the policy's advocates birthed a commodified lifeworld, one that subsequently coursed through multicultural television, electronic games and pretty much everything in-between. Cultural nationalism was trumped by capitalism. In what follows, I'll engage with that position in the context of my understanding of prior Australian history before considering nationalism and cosmopolitanism from an international perspective (usefully done in this volume's chapter on Indigenous television by Ben Dibley and Graeme Turner).
Reconstructing Community-Based Arts: Cultural Value and the Neoliberal Citizen
The relationship between 'community' and 'culture' is an increasingly important one in the context of contemporary neoliberal policy strategies. Within this policy context, 'culture' is routinely argued for in terms of its usefulness and its opposition to instrumental rationales; while the notion of 'community' serves as a locus of resistance to the perceived dangers of modern life, and acts on populations by invoking their autonomy. This thesis examines how community-based arts have been drawn into these policy agendas through case studies of Footscray Community Arts Centre and Multicultural Arts Victoria. The study is informed by the Foucauldian perspective of governmentality, as well as the broad approach of 'everyday multiculturalism'. It examines the rationales underpinning community-based arts. Specifically, it considers the relations that these organisations invoke between 'community', 'culture', and notions of cultural value. The thesis also examines the implications of these relations for the subject of communitybased arts, who is variously conceived as 'citizen', 'consumer', 'audience' and 'artist'. Contemporary community-based arts activity complicates prevailing relations between artists, audiences, cultural institutions and 'communities'. The exclusionary tendencies of the aesthetic ethos are heightened in the current policy climate where economic value is attached to art and creativity. However, the forms of subjectification that take place through the norms of the neoliberal cultural economy are tied up with other norms of selfgovernment, including affirmative practices of self-styling. This dual character of the aesthetic suggests that the 'intrinsic' value of 'culture', and its instrumentalisation are interrelated, rather than opposed, and it requires that we rethink the relationship between the cultural 'margins' and the 'mainstream'. iii DECLARATION This is to certify that i. the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where indicated in the Preface, ii. due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used, iii. the thesis is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices. Signed ________________________________________________________ This research project has been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) at the University of Melbourne. Ethics ID no. 0826692 and 0829843. I wish to thank my supervisor, John Frow, for his thoughtful comments and suggestions, which have helped to clarify my arguments and see my thesis through to its final form. Kate MacNeill and Tony Bennett also provided invaluable feedback and guidance throughout the development of this thesis. The encouragement and insights I gained from Audrey Yue and Scott Brook have helped to shape my work and remind me of its life after my PhD. I am particularly grateful for the cooperation and goodwill of staff at Footscray Community Arts Centre and Multicultural Arts Victoria who assisted with my research and took part in interviews. My work has also benefited from editorial feedback from Local-Global Journal and International Journal of Cultural Policy, in which versions of Chapter Three and Five have been published, respectively. This thesis would not have been possible without the unwavering love and support of my parents, Shamim Khan and Parvin Khan. Tessa Khan's loyalty, generosity and intellect have inspired and sustained me. Alister McKeich's love, humour and (im)patience have kept both me and my work grounded.
Recalibrating culture: production, consumption, policy
The purpose of the ARC Linkage Project (LP130100253) Recalibrating Culture: Production, Consumption, Policy is to understand the work practices of artists and cultural practitioners who live and/or practice in Greater Western Sydney. The research aimed to find out about the nature of artistic and cultural practice, how that work is undertaken, where it is done, and what is needed for arts and cultural practice to happen and prosper.
Graduate Syllabus: Production of Culture in the Digital Age (2017)
Course Description: This is an exciting and transformative moment for cultural production across the globe. Our goal is to lift the veil and explore the concrete making of cultural products (music, cinema, art, digital news, television dramas, etc.) by various types of individuals and organizations, working with diverse technologies, oriented toward divergent audiences. The premise of the course is that the process is not random. There are differences across organizations, networks, and/or fields (pick your framework) and these differences are consequential for the kind of culture that gets produced, which may be normatively desirable or undesirable depending on your conception(s) of excellence and the common good. What are the differences that make a difference: organizational structures and dynamics, forms of ownership and funding, government regulatory regimes, and/or the social properties of media owners, workers, and audiences? These are complex questions, and we will attempt to answer them through comparative research – across geographical regions, time periods, and institutional fields. Drawing on the latest theorizing and research in the sociology of culture and media studies, this course offers a theoretical and methodological roadmap to such a project, incorporating a range of case studies. Teaching / Course Objectives • to provide you with an understanding of the concrete working conditions and challenges that shape the production of culture across a range of cultural fields ; • to provide you with new ideas about how to evaluate and explain how culture gets produced; • to equip you with useful knowledge of the methods you'll need to do original comparative research about cultural production, such as analysis of government and economic data, ethnography, in-depth interviewing, and discourse/image analysis; • to give you an opportunity to conduct your own in-depth research project on contemporary cultural production.
Cultural Trends
Consideration of the "stakes" attached to participation is most clearly associated with the debate around Bourdieu's [(1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge] concept of cultural capital and the role this plays in processes of domination and social closure. Yet, the preferred method of understanding practice variation in the cultural fieldthe analysis of cross-sectional survey data focused on established tastes and activitiesreveals little of the broader nature, dynamics or significance of participation in people's daily lives. In this paper, I explore the potential of participation narratives for re-scoping the field of cultural participation. These accounts foreground the multiplicity of participation, its embeddedness in everyday concerns, institutions and relationships, and the interplay of time and space in the demarcation of the field by class and gender. As well as highlighting the limitations of theoretical models that focus on participation through the lens of cultural practices funded by the State, they suggest that articulations of cultural value in policy need to take more account of the personal histories, social relations and local contexts of participation.
The Politics of Cultural Production
Diaspora Studies
This article examines the politics of cultural production in the Kurdish diaspora in Berlin and Stockholm. The paper argues that Kurdish cultural actors deploy various forms of cultural production as a strategy to restore Kurdish collective heritage and cultural identities and achieve visibility for the Kurdish cause. Furthermore, the politics of cultural production serves to promote universal solidarity for particularistic Kurdish agendas and challenges oppressive policies of ruling Turkish, Iranian and Arab governments. Finally, this article aims to address the integration of Kurdish refugees and boost cohesive diasporic communities to overcome exilic conditions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews with twenty-five Kurdish artists and intellectuals, and participant observations in Berlin and Stockholm, the paper sheds light on how Kurdish cultural production in the diaspora offers an alternative approach to understanding and tackling complex matters. However, at t...
Are we all cultural intermediaries now? An introduction to cultural intermediaries in context
European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2012
The term 'cultural intermediaries' is good to think with: it has been a productive device for examining the producers of symbolic value in various industries, commodity chains and urban spaces, highlighting such issues as the blurring of work and leisure, the conservatism of 'new' and 'creative' work, and the material practices involved in the promotion of consumption (e.g.
Exploring Cultural Globalisation. New forms of experience and citizen-driven change processes
Nordicom review: Nordic research on media & …, 2008
In the following, I present two perspectives that each serve as a comment on Joseph Straubhaar's keynote presentation. 'Global, Hybrid or Multiple? Media Flows and Identities in the Age of Satellite TV and the Internet'. In each their way, my comments refer to the analysis of cultural globalisation which lies at the heart of Joseph Straubhaar's presentation.
The Routledge international handbook of intercultural arts research
The Routledge International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research; pp 115-125 (2016), 2016
Remembering is a realization of belonging, even a social obligation (Assmann, 2008: 114) Can we learn to listen? Or to allow silence to speak to us? Can we visualize the space among us and inhabit it with our memories? These are among the questions raised by, and embedded in, my recent participatory art project 'lo scarto', which evolved through the relational dynamics within the group. It was informed by the Reciprocal Maieutics Approach (RMA Dolci, 1973), a pedagogic process based on collective exploration of individuals' experience and intuition. This enabled intersubjective exchange, the activation of history and memories, and the construction of a narrative related to the current intercultural process taking place in Italy. My creative process is here discussed as research as art practice, in relation to socially engaged and dialogic art, and communicative memory, to act as an interface in an intercultural society. Research As Art Practice In Context As an artist and a researcher, my creative process can be defined as 'Research As Art Practice'. According to Busch (2009) contemporary art is often characterised by an explicit recourse to philosophical or sociological theories, and scientific research and process that "critically analyses both the commodity aspect of artworks and their purely aesthetic impact, as well as the power structures of the art world" (Busch 2009: 1) resulting in interdisciplinary and socially engaged artistic research. My ongoing investigation into the 'interchange' (Cologni, 2004) of artist and audience/participant, based on the co-functioning of self and other (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), and the perceptual, psychological and social dynamics within it, is manifested in participatory and collaborative events, sculptures, drawings and workshops. The live encounter in the form of dialogue is central to the construction of meaning. In particular in my production platform Rockfluid ii my approach was also in-disciplinary "not only a matter of going besides the disciplines but of breaking them" (Baronian, Rancière and Rosello 2008: 2). I have recently focused on processes of memorization in the present and in relation to space/place, through for example 'Spa(e)cious' and 'lo scarto' discussed below. Research as art practice is a natural development from the art practice as research paradigm that emerged in the 1990s, defined as the context where the produced artworks also produced (often critical) knowledge (Busch, 2009), of which my piece Diagrammi (Venice Biennale, 1999, Cologni 2000) is an example. The art research debate grew and intertwined with movements in contemporary art, allowing research in the arts and an evolution of the relationship between theory and practice (Busch, 2009; Sullivan, 2005). These are interwoven in research as art practice, which through different manifestations acts through many registers, and has a wider impact in society because it talks to-while engaging with-different audiences to share the transformation taking place from ideas to artworks, from raw matter to specific constructs, from subjective needs to shared meaningful actions. My artistic research within the Anti Ocularcentric Discourse (Cologni, 2004; Jay, 1993), a critique of the vision-centered western cultural context, is filtered through my own experience as a transnational artist within a now rapidly changing multi-ethnic European continent (Risse, 2004; Checkel and Katzenstein, 2009). The Council of Europe issued the following statement about