Researchers, bureaucrats and the lifeworlds of cultural policy (original) (raw)
2017, International Journal of Cultural Policy
This paper reflects on the value of cultural policy research, particularly when such research forms part of projects that seek to produce insights or 'outcomes' that are useful to non-university research partners. The paper draws from the author's involvement in a project examining cultural diversity in the arts that was funded as part of the Australian Research Council's Linkage Project scheme. It addresses Eleonora Belfiore's provocation that this kind of instrumental cultural policy research routinely amounts to 'bullshit. ' However, in order to understand the critical function of such research, there needs to be greater attention to the lifeworlds of cultural policy and the multiplicity of the policy-making process. This multiplicity both complicates the possibilities for usefulness in policy research, at the same time that it enables such research to be generative in unpredictable ways. The political and economic contexts in which universities operate are changing the terms on which humanities research is conceived and conducted. In countries like Australia and the UK, such research is increasingly shaped by the pressure to demonstrate its usefulness to publics outside the university. Strategies of 'engagement' and 'knowledge transfer' have become central to how universities are repositioning themselves as active participants in public life, while notions of 'public value' and 'impact' form the criteria by which the quality of research is assessed (Schlesinger et al. 2015). These reorientations stem from the belief that universities have too long been inward-looking and irrelevant institutions, cut off from the cultural, governmental and economic spaces in which policy and community-making take place. However, in seeking to bridge the gap between universities and their publics, these strategies can also reinforce the historical distinctions between these worlds, and downplay the more complex ways in which academic, policy and popular knowledges converse and overlap with one another. One of the starting points for this article is to ask whether it is possible to imagine the relationship between universities and 'the wider world' in less polarised terms. Universities have sought to become more relevant by imploring academics to reach out to a world outside academia, but also by importing managerial and evaluative practices from the public and private sectors. In this respect, the differences between these worlds are not as vast as is often assumed. Making academic work accountable to performance metrics is believed to guard against intellectual ARTICLE HISTORY
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