Upon the launch of the Centre for Research in Cultural Policy, Development and Cooperation – CULTURELINK at the Department of Culture and Communications, Institute for Development and International Relations, on September 24th, 2024, Professor Steven Hadley from Trinity College Dublin in Ireland held a guest lecture in the IRMO library titled “Cultural Policy Realism – What is to be Done?” as part of the Culturelink Guest Lecture Series.
The talk applied Mark Fisher’s (2009) idea of capitalist realism to the field of the subsidised arts to outline the concept of ‘cultural policy realism’. Amidst discourses and practices of economic impact measurements, precarity and austerity in the cultural sector and the ongoing privatisation of public resources, the normalisation of capitalist logics within global cultural policies continues apace.
Considering the global spread of the concept of cultural policy from an epistemic governance perspective, the paper follows Alasuutari and Qadir (2019) in arguing that actors influence the comportment of others by utilizing and affecting others’ understandings of reality. When engaged in such epistemic work, actors make use of commonly held beliefs of the cultural field. In persuading others, policy actors appeal to authoritative sources and subjects – whether facts or moral principles – in line with Haas’ (1992) theory of epistemic communities. The paper questions to which community those employed in the arts sector belong. Using the models of ‘faith’, ‘epistemic’ and ‘reality-based’ communities, the paper argues that many structural issues within cultural policy arise from a process of self-misidentification by actors engaged in the sector.
To move debate beyond the parameters of the ‘business ontology’ of neoliberal cultural policy, cultural policy realism questions why debate continues to operate within the “pervasive atmosphere” of the Keynesian model of state subsidy. Such an approach conditions not only the production of culture but also the regulation of cultural work and education, constraining thought and action within the horizon of an established policy process.
The lecture brought together a number of guests from the cultural sector and sparked a dynamic discussion.
The photo gallery from the lecture is available below.
