CULTURELINK – Centre for Research in Cultural Policy, Development and Cooperation is inviting you to the first lecture within the Culturelink Guest Lecture Series, which will be held on Tuesday, September 24, 2024 at 4 p.m. in the library of the Institute for Development and International Relations. Dr Steven Hadley, an internationally awarded cultural policy researcher and editor in the prestigious Cultural Trends magazine, will hold a lecture entitled “Cultural Policy Realism – What is to be Done?”.
This talk will apply 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 is held in English, without translation. The number of places is limited, please confirm your arrival by September 20 via e-mail to: suncana@irmo.hr
