Periodic Reporting for period 3 - UNCHARTED (UNCHARTED: Understanding, Capturing and Fostering the Societal Value of Culture)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-08-01 bis 2024-01-31
However, the plural strategic value of culture is largely lost due to the economism that currently prevails in politics. In recent decades, with the growing emphasis on the creative economy, culture has tended to be increasingly seen in political circles under the exclusive lens of the economy and its contribution to it. Cultural policy, although imbued with the idea of the plurality of values of culture, has also been led to adopt this perspective. It has not been able to produce an alternative vision and generate other evaluation systems that could be opposed, in the political arena or public discourse, to the persuasive evidence of monetary measures. The economic perspective obscures the non-economic dimensions of culture and makes it difficult for politics to take on the effective promotion of the plurality of its values.
In our view, a meaningful understanding of the plurality of the values of culture in Europe is only possible if we consider the multiplicity of agents who participate in valuation processes and the diversity of evaluative practices in which they engage. Consequently, our work has focused on the valuation practices of the actors involved in cultural life. Through the systematic analysis of these practices in different areas of the cultural sphere the project aimed to provide an alternative vision of the societal value of culture in Europe, and on the other hand, a roadmap for cultural policy action favourable to the plurality of cultural values.
WP2's (Sep. 20 – Sep.21) main aim was to identify the plurality of values and tensions that emerge in four fundamental arenas of cultural practice: cultural participation in live arts and culture, cultural participation through media, cultural production and heritage management, and cultural administration. The valuations and tensions identified in the four domains, considering the contexts of emergence, the actors involved, and the conflicts and tensions between the valuations detected, make up a complex cartography of values.
WP3 (Oct. 2021 - Feb. 2023) aims was to understand the diverse systems of (e)valuation characterizing the four topical areas in which the work package is articulated. The goal was achieved by analyzing tensions and conflicts in how citizens, professionals, and public administrators construct, measure, compare and rank the values they attribute to culture. Axial tensions and conflicts have been further investigated in WP3 analyzing how they are managed in different regimes of evaluation using different evaluative tools and developing different tension resolutions. In this sense, our analysis has allowed us to identify the contextual conditions that activate tensions in different domains.
WP4 (Feb. 2023 - Jan. 2024) addressed the central challenge of assessing the strategies and effectiveness of cultural policy and institutions in taking full advantage of the potential benefits of culture for society. It is divided into two strands. The first strand focused on the coherence of cultural policies in Europe regarding the values they promote. The second strand focused on the action of cultural institutions, the way they promote the plurality of cultural values and how they perceive their impact in this matter. The impact towards providing concrete guidelines for reorientating cultural policies in a pluralistic sense was delivered through a roadmap.
WP5 (Oct. 2021 - Jan. 2024) aimed to monitor and examine concrete experiments and demonstrations carried out by citizens, professionals, administrators, and policy makers, all in relation to the development of cultural values. The main question of methodology was therefore to trace the modalities of how cultural policies and valuation strategies can be developed in co-creation processes in three axes: Cultural strategic planning, Culture-led urban regeneration, and Cultural information system. As a final outcome of WP5, the assessment report identified benefits and obstacles that are met by those organisations that aimed to take the results of the project and to put them into action.