CULTURAL POLICIES

The course has the ambition to present to future arts and cultural managers a view of culture and the arts as social phenomena, deeply involved in political debates and enrolled in transformative ambitions. It is designed as an introduction to why and how cultural policies are shaped and implemented at the local, national, and international scale. Lectures and active learning interactions with students will promote a view of theories and practices of cultural policy as embedded in urban planning, intercultural and international relations, management practices, public administration, creative industries, global media, and business players, as well as local social movements. Cultural policies will be analysed from a historical, comparative, and practical perspective, with a focus on the key players in the field, both public and private, the intersection with other public policies, and the strategic challenges that regions and cities are facing. The course is eminently interdisciplinary, theoretical approaches will be drawn from several disciplines such as geography, organization studies, aesthetics, cultural studies, anthropology, politics, history, and philosophy. The discussions will focus on global trends considering mostly the UK, the rest of Europe and, partially, Italy and Southeast Asia. The course will also try and discuss the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the cultural and creative sectors and how cultural policies contribute to shaping the idea of “recovery”.

In terms of knowledge acquisition, students are expected to understand how policies on culture are shaped and their impacts on the development of society in terms of the make-up of local, national, and global orders; their role in the shaping of cultural practices, expressions, and ideology; their relations to production and enterprising and hence their role in the shaping of our identity, taste, and value as well as economy and policy. In terms of values and skills, students are expected to develop a critical ability to evaluate the wide diversity of cultural policies and a balanced view of local and global issues. Students will also acquire knowledge about different visual and textual meanings and form the ability to appreciate and evaluate the importance and significance of the inter-disciplinary nature of cultural policies.
Upon successful completion of the course, students should be able to:
• Gain understanding of the key concepts and terminology, which inform thinking about cultural policy, drawn from different disciplines.
• Gain understanding of the key debates, issues, and events (historical and contemporary) in the formation of, and responses to, national and international cultural policy initiatives.
• Reflect upon the role of state in shaping the cultural formation of society.
• Learn how to locate and critique cultural policy, focusing upon policy debates and challenges that contribute to or impede cultural sustainability
• Identify and analyse cultural policies expressed both explicitly and implicitly through legislation, guidelines, initiatives, and other actions as well as community responses to these policies.
• Examine intersections between cultural policies at international, national, regional, and local official public policy levels and local cultural processes and community concerns in the student’s own community and elsewhere.
• Develop the ability to critically analyse cultural policies designed to generate economic development, and to critically consider the effects of economic development policies and tourism initiatives on local cultural sustainability.
• Understand how issues and cultural policy trends develop locally, nationally, and globally and how policies are being created around it.
• Identify and critique knowledge which acquires, dominating authorities, ideologies and fashions in management and cultural studies.

To take full advantage of the learning experience proposed in this course students are expected to have an advanced knowledge of both the artistic and managerial aspects of cultural production. A keen interest for political aspects such as collective goals, common goods, social transformation, ideology, and conflict will facilitate the understanding of some key discussions proposed during the lectures and in the required materials. Some familiarity with the fundamentals of western philosophy and historical periodization, especially of the XX° century, would also be convenient.

0. Introducing Cultural Policy
Cultural Policy: Definitions and Theoretical Approaches
Explicit and implicit cultural policies
1. The Culture of Cultural Policy
Defining culture
High, low and everything in-between
The cultural industries debate
The creative industries
The creative or cultural economy?
Consuming high and low
The study of cultural policy
2. The Policy of Cultural Policy
Cultural policymakers
Who made local cultural strategies?
Cultural policy as object
Government and the uses of culture
Doing cultural policy studies
Cultural policy as discourse
Cultural policy as text
Cultural policy as process
Cultural policy as practice
New moves in policy research
3. Urban Cultural Policy
Cultural policies in the city
Flagship cultural building and regeneration
Cultural quarters and clusters
City competitions
The creative city
The city as an attraction
Major events and neoliberal rhetorics
Urban and social sustainability
Urban policy coalitions
Culture and conflict in the city
4. National Cultural Policy
Nations on display
Imagined communities, invented traditions, banal nationalisms
National character
Policy and politics of culture
The involvement of the government in the management of cultural affairs
The control, protection and promotion of culture
Typologies and models of national cultural policy
Subnational cultural policy
Supranational cultural policy
5. International Cultural Policy
The complex relationship between culture and globalisation.
Cultural trade
Cultural diversity
Culture and development
Cultural diplomacy and exchange
The Covid-19 crisis: a comparative analysis of early policy measures

The following materials are required for the course:

Mulcahy K., (2006), Cultural Policy: Definitions and Theoretical Approaches, The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society
Ahearne J., (2009), Cultural policy explicit and implicit: a distinction and some uses, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15:2, 141-153
Bell, D. & Oakley, K., Cultural Policy, 2015 Routledge
Betzler, D., Loots, E., Prokupek M., Marques L. & Grafenauer P.(2021) COVID-19 and the arts and cultural sectors: investigating countries’ contextual factors and early policy measures, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 27:6, 796-814,
Lee, H., Ling-Fung Chau, K. & Terui, T.,(2021): The Covid-19 crisis and ‘critical juncture’ in cultural policy: a comparative analysis of cultural policy responses in South Korea, Japan and China, International Journal of Cultural Policy,
Ganga, R., Wise, N. & Perìc, M. (2021): Exploring implicit and explicit cultural policy dimensions through major-event and neoliberal rhetoric, City, Culture and Society

Digital journal (30% of the grade)
Students will be asked to keep a journal of their learning experience by writing a daily post (max 200/300 words) on the Moodle forum reflecting on the topics discussed in class. The daily journal should be an individual reflection on the topics presented by the professor in class that same day and/or the chapter/articles assigned for readings. Students can also join the conversation by reacting to postings submitted by their colleagues. Students can write what they think they have learned from each day’s lesson, discuss how different themes are connected, or how their daily learning could be of relevance for the development of their academic interest or professional career. Overall, the posts should demonstrate the ability to connect the topics discussed in class with actual and contemporary issues, episodes, initiatives, controversies taken from debates occurring in mainstream media and framing them within conceptual and political perspectives.

Daily pitching (20% of the grade)
At the beginning of each class (starting on Week 1, day 3) one or more students will be assigned to pitch to the class for 10 minutes about the discussion that has been developing in the forum in the previous day. The presenter(s) is expected to summarize the collective discussion, identify common issues, and key points, and leave the class with one question for the professor and the rest of the students to respond to. The presentation should demonstrate the ability to critically interpret the different views, construct and propose a coherent argument and identify gaps and open issues that require additional reflection and may lead to further discussion. In other words, the presenter(s) is supposed to assume the role of the lecturer for the initial part of the class and offer an assessment of the extension, clarity, depth, and creativity of the discussion that has been going on in the forum. The presenter(s) are expected to use slides or other forms of visualization of their presentation.

Research Paper (40% of the grade)
Students are required to write a research paper (3500-4000 words) on a cultural policy topic of their choice drawing from theoretical aspects of cultural policy, case studies encountered during lectures, insights from additional reading, engagement in contemporary discussion in the media or from personal experience. The research paper will have to look like an expanded essay that presents the student’s own thinking and interpretation backed up by the ideas of scholars and experts in the field. The research paper will have to feature a review of the literature that requires to research information and then summarize and paraphrasing. It will then add the step of synthesizing the information and developing the student’s own insight or argument on the topic or issue that the information presents. In the research paper, the student is expected to address one central question and develop a thesis, i.e. the answer to the question thus anticipating the type of intellectual exercise that is required for the master thesis. The research paper must be handed in by the end of week 6 of the course.

Research paper presentation (10% of the grade)
The main findings of the research paper (topic, research question, development of the thesis, answer to the research question) will be presented by each student during the last day of class.

The course is elective and as such deliberately designed for students who wish to actively engage in a conversation with the professor and their peers. Class participation isn’t therefore “strongly advised” but rather taken for granted as a key element of the learning pact that is implicitly signed by enrolling in the course. Students who expect to sit, listen, record notes and be infused with expert knowledge are possibly not the ideal participants in the type of leaning experience we want to generate in this course. The professor will of course cover the topics discusses and analyzed in the required readings but the views (written and spoken) of students will form an integral part of the teaching method.

English

Additional readings:
Durrer, V., Miller, T. & O'Brien D., (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy, 2019, Routledge
MacDowall, L., Badham, M., Blomkamp, E., & Dunphy, K. (eds.) Making Culture Count. The Politics of Cultural Measurement 2015 Palgrave MacMillan

written and oral

This subject deals with topics related to the macro-area "Poverty and inequalities" and contributes to the achievement of one or more goals of U. N. Agenda for Sustainable Development