Lisanne Gibson

Urban Space and the Uses of Culture

This paper was published as International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2004, 10 (1), pp. 1-4. The final version is available from http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/1028663042000212292. Doi: 10.1080/1028663042000212292

In defence of instrumentality

The discussion of the so-called “instrumentalization” of cultural institutions and programmes has been a key focus for the cultural policy, museum and heritage studies literatures over the past few years. This article will challenge the historical accuracy of claims that “instrumentality” is a recent “threat” to the management and funding of culture. Rather I will argue that historically, instrumental cultural policies have been policies of production. Further, through an analysis of the terms of the “instrumentalization debate” in relation to museums I will show that there is no consensus in the understanding of what constitutes instrumental or intrinsic functions. The “instrumental/intrinsic” dichotomy is too simplistic to allow grounded critical engagement with the real complexities of cultural institutions and programmes. Finally, I argue that in order to work critically with institutions, policies and programmes it is necessary to engage with the practicalities of their arrangements. To do so is to recognize the complexity of institutions which are often internally divided. While commentators simply continue to de-construct the “instrumentalist” cultural policy agenda, the reality is that some cultural institutions continue to pay, at best, lip service to the political imperative to become more inclusive. In this social and political context, critical engagement, which is grounded in the practicalities of cultures administration, is crucial if we are to develop analyses that seek to understand and contribute to the development of programmes that break with the elitisms which have characterized cultural programmes in the past.

Everyday participation and cultural value

The articles in this special issue present some of the early findings of Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values (UEP), a five-year large grant project, which began in 2012 and is part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme, receiving supplementary funding from Creative Scotland. The project starts from the proposition that the orientation of cultural policy and state-funded cultural programming towards cultural participation and value is in need of a radical overhaul. We argue that there is an orthodoxy of approach to cultural engagement which is based on a narrow definition (and understanding) of participation, one that focuses on a limited set of cultural forms, activities and associated cultural institutions but which, in the process, obscures the significance of other forms of cultural participation which are situated locally in the everyday realm. Drawing together a large interdisciplinary team of researchers, which meshes interests across the humanities, social sciences and the policy sector, UEP’s research seeks to identify and apprehend everyday cultural participation and the values people attach to this, especially in relation to the social sphere. Our aim in doing this is to reorientate the focus of both academic and policy work on “cultural value” and thereby to cast fresh light on the nature and significance of cultural preferences and activities in the UK in the twenty-first century. We can already, part way through the project, point to the consistency of findings across the methods used in our research, which reveal (1) the rich variety of cultural participation activities, the vast majority of which lies beyond the orbit of State cultural support, and (2) the importance of these everyday forms of participation for developing social capital and sustaining social networks, and for defining the parameters of “community”. As Elias (1998) reflected, working with the concept of the everyday implies the mobilisation of its opposite, which in this case is the “official” framework of cultural participation and value in the UK (Griffiths, Miles, & Savage, 2008). This can be defined as the largely formal and traditional practices, venues and institutions funded by government through the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Following Bourdieu (1984), this framework can be seen to reflect a series of historical and cultural assumptions about certain tastes and forms of activity being canonised by the State as more valuable than others, and which can act as powerful symbols of social distinction. As Miles and Sullivan (2010, 2012) argue, the operationalisation of this framework by the State under the New Labour governments of 1997–2010 involved a decontextualisation of cultural value that was accompanied by the mobilisation of a “deficit model of participation” reflecting middle-class norms and understandings of what was to count as “legitimate” culture. Here, policies that prioritised access to culture in the name of reducing social exclusion were at same time part of a process of discrimination, marking out and marginalising those people and places that did not associate themselves with established culture as passive, isolated and in need of (remedial) attention (Gibson, in press; Miles, 2013). The logics of the “social inclusion” narrative within cultural policy and across cultural practice have recently been extended through discourses of “access” and “participation” into collaboration, co-production and co-curation, although arguably there has not been a real expansion in the cultural activities which are the focus of co-production practices (Gibson & Edwards, 2016).

Managing the People: Art Programs in the American Depression

t has become increasingly familiar to explain the contemporary arrangeI ments for the management of culture in terms of culture’s “privatization.” This characterization describes a trend identifiable across those governmental sectors-health, education, and social security-stablished (in their nationalized form) as part of the post-World War I1 welfare state. As there has been a (relative) withdrawal of government from these sectors in recent years, the government role in the subvention of culture has also come into question. This shift in what Michel Foucault called “governmentality” (Foucault 1991) produces a range of problems for access to diverse cultural resources, cultural pluralism, and funding for nonprofitable “research and development” in the cultural sector. Because these issues have been examined elsewhere, I will not revisit or discuss further the issues at stake in this shift in governmentality.’ Instead, by examining particular art programs from the 1930s, I will essay a theoretical framework for the analysis of conjunctions of culture and government. The relations between culture and government are best defined by the identifying how different strategies for the management of populations have been organized and deployed. Such an approach provides a distinctive perspective on the history of culture and government. The relations between culture and government have been varied but can be best understood by examining how government has strategically used art to act on the “social.” In this article I will describe the different organizing principles that inform the conjunctions

Facilitated participation: cultural value, risk and the agency of young people in care

ABSTRACT Since the mid-nineteenth century, cultural practice and its management have been attached to a discourse that constructs participation, in particular kinds of cultural activity, as “beneficial” to individuals on the basis that its effects have resonance beyond the cultural sphere. More recently, “leading edge” cultural practice and programmes have been based on the notion that benefit from such participation occurs via the facilitation of the active agency of participants through the making of their own meanings through co-curation and co-creation. Enlistment and involvement in, what we have termed “facilitated participation”, is, in Nikolas Rose’s terms, a tool of “advanced liberalism” whereby the governance of individuals operates on the basis of the governance of their “freedom”, through making them self-governing subjects [Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press]. In the particular case of young people living in care, we have found that the facilitation of their agency through cultural programmes is limited by an assumption that such groups’ everyday cultural choices lack value and to facilitate them (and thereby their agency) would involve risk. Through a discussion of research undertaken with this group, this paper will explore how different domains of participation are understood by both the facilitators and the facilitated.

Culture, class, distinction

Culture, Class, Distinction is one of the central outcomes from an Economic and Social Research Council funded project, Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: A Critical Investigation, which commenced in 2003. The project aimed to revisit the methodological and theoretical relevance of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s conception of “cultural capital” for understanding the relations between cultural taste and consumption and social class in contemporary Britain. The study examined aspects of consumption and participation in the cultural fields of music, reading, visual art, television, film and sport in order to find out:

Counting the pennies: the cultural economy of charity shopping

ABSTRACT The Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values (UEP) project is grounded in the belief that the current system for the support of culture promotes and privileges certain practices and activities, tastes, relationships and competences and that, crucially, this system has effects that extend outside of the cultural domain to the economic, political and social spheres. In order to challenge this dominance, UEP sets out to explore the meanings and values people attach to their “everyday participation”, with the aim of re-evaluating current understandings of cultural participation and cultural value [Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2016). Understanding everyday participation-articulating cultural values. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 151–157]. This article discusses UEP ethnographic research conducted within a charity shop in Manchester/ Salford. The charity shop is found to be a site fundamentally involved in the “cultural economy”, defined broadly to refer to the relations between the cultural and economic values of particular practices and institutions involved in cultural production and consumption. Existing research on consumption have understood the charity shop as a place of cultural consumption, for certain subcultures that make “clever” choices regarding their identities [Gregson, N., & Crewe, L. (2003). Second hand cultures. Oxford: Berg]. This article argues for an understanding of the charity shop as more than simply a place of consumption but as enmeshed within a set of relations between culture, economy and place which has effects in the social sphere. This research identifies a number of forms of participation, including consumption, but also extending to various production practices, and other forms of social interaction, which take place within and through the charity shop. We argue that these different types of participation are bound up in a positioning cultural system that categorises people, places and values within and beyond the sphere of the charity shop.

Libraries and the geography of use: how does geography and asset “attractiveness” influence the local dimensions of cultural participation?

ABSTRACT The project “Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values” (2012–2018) explores the ways in which the “situatedness” of participation is an important factor in understanding the socio-political dynamics of cultural participation [Miles, A., & Gibson, L. (2016). Everyday participation and cultural value. Cultural Trends, 25(3), 151–157]. This paper on the geography of library use is an early presentation of ongoing research which seeks to understand the impact of geography and asset “attractiveness” on particular kinds of cultural participation. Many studies have focused on traditional “push” factors to participation, understanding attendance and participation in their various forms through individual- and household-level demographic and socio-economic characteristics [e.g. Bennett, T., Savage, M., Silva, E., Warde, A., Gayo, M., & Wright, D. (2009). Culture, class, distinction. London: Routledge]. However, a number of recent studies have also revealed the significant effects of supply and proximity on participation [Brook, O. (2013). Reframing models of arts attendance: Understanding the role of access to a venue. The case of opera in London. Cultural Trends, 22(2), 97–107; Brook, O. (2016). Spatial equity and cultural participation: How access influences attendance at museums and galleries in London. 25(1), 12–34; Widdop, P., & Cutts, D. (2012). Impact of place on museum participation. Cultural Trends, 21(1), 47–66; Hooper-Greenhill, E., Phillips, M., & Woodham, A. (2009). Museums, schools and geographies of cultural value. Cultural Trends, 18(2), 149–183]. In this paper, our approach to the geography of cultural participation focuses on the role of what we are terming “pull factors” to participation at specific locales over others. Many forms of participation in socio-cultural activities involve a level of spatial decision-making, weighing up factors relating to the destination(s), and the time and effort of getting there. How much do these “pull factors” impact on participation, and are they quantifiable? In order to understand if these spatial considerations are an explanatory factor in explaining the socio-demography of library use, we have applied the urban planning concept of trip-chaining and a geographically defined categorisation of asset attractiveness [O’Reilly, N., Berger, I. E., Hernandez, T., Parent, M. M., & Seguin, B. (2015). Urban sportscapes: An environmental deterministic perspective on the management of youth sport participation. Sport Management Review, 18, 291–307.; Thill, J.-C., & Thomas, I. (1987). Toward conceptualizing trip-chaining behavior: A review. Geographical Analysis, 19, 1–17] to reveal the extent to which a library visit is linked to other everyday activities. This paper introduces the preliminary findings of this study which aims to assess the impact of geospatial variables on cultural participation.