About the Organisers

Liz Stainforth

Policy plays a central role in my PhD research. Over the past 15 years cultural heritage and digitisation has been shaped by a number of key policy statements, frameworks and funding calls. As well as enabling major projects such as Europeana, these have informed shifting understandings of the relationship between ‘heritage’ and ‘the digital’. My work is specifically concerned with the ideological significance attributed to memory, understood as a form of national or transnational inheritance, in relation to debates about digitisation and the preservation of cultural heritage. My research explores the politics of this relationship further through analysis of the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal, spanning the period 1994-present, within major organisational and cultural settings.

Leila Jancovich

The rhetoric of cultural policy has placed increasing emphasis on the participation agenda over the last 15 years. But despite this, a study of grey literature demonstrates that there has been little change in the basis upon which arts institutions receive regular funding, or the social composition of those who participate in the arts in Britain today - who remain predominantly white and middle class. Government surveys further provide evidence that the arts are perceived as elitist, and policy too insular and self-reflective. Through interviews with policymakers, practitioners and the public, my PhD examines participatory decision-making in the arts. It examines case studies of practice as well as the levers and barriers to policy implementation in general.

Alice Borchi

My PhD is a contribution to the debate on cultural value, which is an important research area of Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at Warwick University and also the core of the #Culturalvalue Initiative, an international platform of discussion led by Dr. Elenora Belfiore. My research focuses on the relationship between historical context, governmental policies and the perception of culture in the contemporary Italian society, exploring the change in cultural value in Italy from 2008 to the present day, a period when the economic crisis has strongly influenced the everyday behaviour of the Italian people. This project, that includes theoretical and historical research, normative analysis, interviews and case studies, has the purpose to understand the change in perceptions of cultural value in Italy, a country with a rich cultural tradition, analyzing different sectors and different aspects of the national and local cultural life.