Overview: Afternoon Workshop 07-04-2014

The afternoon workshop session, on the theme of 'Cultural Policy-Cultural Politics' was led by Dr Dave O’Brien (Lecturer in Cultural Industry Studies, City University London) and Dr Helen Graham (Research Fellow in Tangible and Intangible Heritage, University of Leeds). Both have been involved in the Connected Communities Research Programme, and they are currently working together on the Connecting Epistemologies strand. The session started with an introduction to Dave and Helen's respective work.

Dave spoke about the research he carried out while working on the DCMS's Measuring the Value of Culture programme, which has informed the topic of his first book, Cultural Policy: Management, Value & Modernity in the Creative Industries. He contrasted this experience, working among policy elites, with the grassroots approaches to arts engagement employed in one of his current projects, 'Cultural intermediation: connecting communities in the creative urban economy'.

Helen spoke about her project 'How should decisions about heritage be made?', with reference to the Stonebow House case study.

Stonebow House

Who used to use the site?
Who uses it now?
What would we like to use it for in the future?

How can all of us make a good decision?
What do we need to know?
Who needs to be involved?

Because in the case of Stonebow House there will be a ‘decision’, there needs to be:
Democratic understanding of knowledge,
Use of conversation and networking,
Leading to public constituency for more democratic decision.

She demonstrated the complex network of decision makers and agencies implied in the case of Stonebow, using the mapping software Coggle:

Participants (who had been split into groups based on shared research interests) were then asked to develop their own impact plan:

How might you position your research?
How does it relate to ‘policy’ and ‘politics’?
Who are the key actors and networks you might interact with?
Where/when are key decision making points?
How will you know if you’ve been successful?
What is your theory of how your research leads to social and political change?
What kinds of ways of knowing might prove effective in different contexts?

Time was allocated at the end for feedback from the group discussions. Issues that emerged related to the importance of organisational processes and personal relationships for influencing policy (one group asked the question, 'can you systematise a personal relationship?'), the difficulty of translating academic language into policy language, and local vs. national perspectives on cultural policy.