Debt and the Public University

On the 11^th June I was one of a Roundtable Discussion Panel, called ‘Debt and the Public University’ (2015, 16.00-17.30 International Manufacturing Centre). The Panel featured Oliver Davis (French), Lauren Tooker (Politics), Myka Tucker-Abramson (English), Jonathan Vickery (Cultural Policy Studies), Callum Cant and Hope Worsdale (Warwick Free Education). The occasion was IAS Visiting Fellow Joshua Clover – a notable scholar from University of California, Davis, award-winning poet, and radical activist. Clover is known for his theories of ‘crisis capitalism’, organizing resistance to student debt-loads in California, and his focusing on the significance of debt in reshaping the priorities and direction of higher education. This Panel was asked to tackle two questions – concerning our understanding of the nature of debt, and our understanding of how it is changing our profession (and by implication, the student—professor relationship).

My contribution, on reflection, contained some mawkish nostalgia for the days when student fees were ushered in by New Labour. Yes, it was the Left who introduced student fees. Blunkett, a one-time far-left local government activist, vowed they would not rise from the £1000 per annum limit at which he had set it (which, I remember, sounded hollow even at the time – even if, even then, the £1000 seemed more like a heavily subsided contribution rather than a costed fee). More importantly was how the Left rationalised this decision. I remember several lines of debate, not least references to how Blunkett’s ‘Methodism’ (as with Gordon Brown’s Scottish Calvinism later) introduced a component of personal responsibility to public expenditure (as a moral obligation of government) -- teaching youngsters the ‘true’ value of money’ was surely a good thing. Other, more political lines of argument, went something like (and I paraphrase) ‘plumbers and builders should not be subsidising the education of the middle classes’; another argument was similarly made on ‘class’ grounds, albeit policy-based: ‘Fees will be means-tested, in reality only paid by ‘middle class’ students, providing a raft of scholarships for all ‘working class’ students’. Fees could thus introduce a new financial mechanism of social equality. At the time, the former (ethical) argument and the latter (foiled) plan, were both subsequently inadequate to the shifts in both political thinking and public opinion that emerged. From this two things are obvious: that public policies (like fees for higher education) are rarely subject to thorough research and evaluation and a management of their consequences -- policy makers often have little imaginative anticipation of the lateral or unintended outcomes of their policies. Debt has generated social conditions that threaten to exceed the very orbit of public policies, and like a runaway train, are generating problems so pervasive they will cease to be categorised as ‘student debt’. And further – with reference to Joshua Clover’s various talks, lectures and statements (on You Tube, for example) – this exceeds the often mundane arguments between the current political ‘Left and Right’.

Clover’s thinking on this subject by-passed a lot of the chatter on the current affairs of subsidy, costs or particular HE policies. Debt, rather, has become a structural feature of global 'crisis capitalism'. Debt has become an industry, and so an embedded part of the economy. The agents of debt (between 2006-10) brought Western economies to their knees, degrading or wiping out generations of workers investments, labour pensions and the accumulated savings of ordinary citizens. Student fees – and with it the financial structures of higher education – are being systematically absorbed into this industry, and while banks and politicians alike tend to frame student fees in terms of ‘investment’ or even ‘credit, of which there is precious little policy research on the long term consequences and political implications. That debt is systematic and pervasive generates a new economic reality, to the extent that all parties, Left and Right, now accept it as a matter of fact, or an epiphenomenon of a global economy outside the political influence of any one government or even one global agency. And so what started with a perfectly reasonable attempt to introduce some moral responsibility into public finance ends up as some Frankenstein monster that, right now, doesn’t benefit anyone except the most dangerous actors on the economic stage.

Jonathan Vickery : 22 Jul 2015 10:30 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

What Has Cultural Policy Studies Got to Do with Supply Chain Strategy?

Photography by Alex Kharlamov

In 2014 I was awarded funding by the Institute of Advanced Teaching and Learning for an academic fellowship project. The Mediasmith Project was an experimental and particpatory series of workshops and events exploring transmedia and documentary making approaches to research. We borrowed from the expertise of filmmakers, producers, creative technologists and web developers to investigate how web-native and digital storytelling, digital media production, coding and other digital tools could inform the research process.

The final event, the Popathon x Mediasmith Project Storytelling Hack Jam took place in February 2015 but the learning has continued to inform new developments behind the scenes. Many of the methods we explored are about to be put to the test in a large-scale public research project about the public understanding of supply chains; MyChainReaction.

Professor Jan Godsell, Professor of Supply Chain Strategy at WMG, was a keen participant in the Mediasmith Project workshops. During the first workshop one of the models of transmedia practice that I proposed was the creation and presentation of a film or digital asset as a seed or provocation for discussion and the creation of new narratives. By the time the third workshop had taken place (May 2014) Jan had already put a small production team together. They produced a short film about supply chains with the intention of provoking a wider public debate about them but why stop there?

Supply chains and public participation
Jan is intrigued that there is no shared definition of supply chains within academia, despite the fact that they are recognised as a discreet disciplinary field. She also suspects that awareness and understanding of supply chains amongst the wider public is relatively poor. "The issue of supply chains is of national importance. Supply chains are key in supporting economic growth, contributing to increasing both GDP and employment levels. Supply chains touch almost every aspect of our daily lives but many of us don’t know or realise this and we want to know why.” These considerations proved fertile ground for the development of a research impact project that could not only test these assumptions, but do so by inviting the public around the world to participate.

Interdisciplinary team
The research team consisting of Jan, Antony Karatzas, a research fellow at WMG, Rob Batterbee, IT Manager for Student Careers and Skills, and I submitted a proposal to the ESRC Impact Accelerator fund. The core of the project combines crowdsourcing, social networking and storytelling in a website designed to both generate research data and increase public engagement and understanding as more and more people take part. The site features an engaging example of a local supply chain, bringing to life the story of Stroud based ice cream maker Kate Lowe. Kate lives in a village where she is well known for producing delicious honeycomb ice cream. Her mother makes the honeycomb at home in Norfolk and posts it to Kate who then makes the ice cream in batches using other locally sourced ingredients. Kate’s ice cream is infamous at dinner parties and family gatherings but her ambitions are to develop a brand and sell her ice cream more widely. Website visitors are encouraged to reflect on their own participation in a supply chain and share their stories which are simultaneously pinned on the MyChainReaction map. In doing so they also answer a couple of simple questions about their knowledge of supply chains which will generate quantitative data for further research.

Transmedia integration
The website is, however, just one part of an integrated transmedia approach. We have also reserved funding for an artistic commission in which artists will be invited to respond to the themes of the project and the stories that emerge. Their work will be presented at the Global Supply Chain Debate, to be hosted at the International Digital Lab at the University of Warwick in November 2015.

Premature dissemination
Appealing for public participation adds a whole layer of marketing and communications activity usually reserved for the dissemination of research rather than the research process itself. We have debated the ethics of allowing research participants to see others' stories (but not responses to the research questions) at length, initially worrying that this may bias their participation. However, audience participation is an inherently social activity - participation depends on the motivation that stems from seeing what others have posted and the willingness to share. This decision making process impacted on the intrinsic design of the website. Should we prime the audience with a working example whilst restricting access to the crowd sourced stories to those who had registered and completed the research questions first? Or, should we make this content accessible to everyone in the hope that this will motivate others to take part? Creating such a ‘walled garden’ felt counter-intuitive and, given that the only criteria our research respondents need to satisfy are a) the possession of a valid email address and b) a story to tell, the risk of skewing the user generated content seemed to be outweighed by the social imperative to join others and take part.

'Infectious' research?
Supply chains are perhaps not the most accessible and people friendly subject so another challenge has been to find the right language by which to describe and pitch the project. Discussions of food security, provenance and sustainability have done much to highlight the importance of supply chains in relation to food and agriculture, hence our working example, but they remain less visible in other areas of public life. It’s also a question of semantics as we may well be referring to supply chains but in different terms or contexts which, we believe, have nothing to do with them e.g. the arts, education, medicine, etc. We also wanted to promote the cause and effect relationships that our interactions with supply chains produce so, after much head scratching, we arrived at the concept of a chain reaction. This gave us a unique hashtag and a call to action (with a little help from Diana Ross and RCA Records); ‘Get in the middle of a chain reaction.’ It has even inspired a spoof sing-a-along video, produced by students on the MA in Creative and Media Enterprises, designed to raise a smile and promote the project.

Ninety-five Not Out
We are acutely aware of the ambition and novelty of our approach. So far we have ninety-five stories and counting. If you are reading this why not add one more to the #MyChainReaction map?

Ruth Leary : 10 Jul 2015 16:56 |  Tags: Research Technology; Transmedia |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Future of Interdisciplinary Research – the IAS at the Shard

Warwick staff members with connections to the Warwick Institute of Advanced Study [IAS] were invited to this half-day symposium on Friday 15^th May, held in the Warwick space at the spectacular Shard building in London Bridge. The Shard is becoming a showcase for the highest levels of Warwick teaching and research (and, I must say, whose rates for room rental are several stratospheres above any Humanities budget I have ever seen). This half-day event was, in part, a symposium that celebrated the first eight years of the IAS, and which gathered an audience to hear about recently funded projects in interdisciplinary research, particularly from younger scholars at Warwick (mostly IAS post-doc Fellows). With luminaries like Sir George Cox present, as well as notable interdisciplinary scholars from other universities, the ensuing Q&A and discussion was fairly substantial and the event well-worth attending (not least the lunch – what one would expect at a place like the Shard. I'm definitely going back).

What is the role of an IAS? It exists to promote interdisciplinarity, and also cultivate higher levels of exchange where regular faculty and departmental contexts are not effective. Considering the worldwide intellectual impact of the famous Princeton University Institute for Advanced Study (which I visited briefly when on a week’s residency at the Princeton Centre for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies in 2006 and again in 2008), the aims of the IAS project are surely compelling. But why is 'interdisciplinarity' still at issue? As Provost Professor Stuart Croft said in his introduction, there is something slightly anachronistic about the very term. We have, for decades, been discussing cross-disciplinary, multidisciplinary, transdiscilinarity and a whole range of other configurations, so why is 'interdisciplinarity' still at issue? And as Michael Hatt (Art History) said to me the day before the event, as we waited for his taxi to the rail station: the major question facing us is surely, ‘what is disciplinarity’ – what was it, ever, particularly in the Humanities?

I was, as an undergrad through the first half of the 1990s, repeatedly told by professors, and with some conviction, that within a decade all disciplinary boundaries (and their Victorian obsession with the individualist book and article-formats of presenting and delivering research) would have dissolved. This seemingly water-tight forecast – made self-evident by the authoritative writings of a generation of anti-foundationalist anti-Humanists from Habermas to Rorty, Foucault to Derrida, to Jameson and Eagleton, Lyotard to Rancière – was, at the time, indisputable. And how it deceived an entire generation of undergraduates. Their introduction to the world of research started with an ethical obligation to ‘critique the Canon’ (assuming they knew what the Canon was, which most didn’t) and a new rule of multi-perspectival interdisciplinary ‘approaches’ to everything -- to life and the meaning of the universe, and especially your undergrad essays, which in practice meant a kind of low-intensity cultural studies (a cod sociology without particular regard for methods). As for me, I feel grateful for catching the last days of some marginalised Germanic, right of centre, traditionalists. Otherwise -- your right -- I feel conned.

Well, not exactly; more accurately, I feel intrigued and fascinating in equal measure as I look back at the decades in which interdisciplinarity was a 'politics' of the institutional mediation of knowledge-construction, stimulated by the emergence of new discourses in social epistemology and sociology of knowledge, which in turn had an impact on the professors that taught me critical theory in my postgrad days. Why does intellectual history takes the form it does? It was during these postgrad days that Harvard published Randall Collins’s monumental The Sociology of Philosophies, which I still find utterly fascinating for just these reasons.

The IAS symposium opened with four statements from a panel of special guests, including Pete Churchill of the Joint Research Centre of the European Union, Rick Rylance of the AHRC and Jane Elliot of the ESRC, all largely celebrating the university sector’s collective advance in interdisciplinary research. And yet, while the symposium remained good natured and calm, the questions and comments that followed were not so taken by this institutionalised optimism (Oliver Bennett should have been present to throw some light on this).

Indeed: look at the rise of the natural sciences in the last 15 years, and the re-validation of the naturalism and empiricism so torn apart by critical theory between 1940 and 1980. Look at the unhindered rise of neo-positivism and the supremacy of ‘data’ and ‘evidence’ in defining ‘truth’. Indeed, in my undergrad days, any student naively using the words ‘truth’, ‘fact’ or ‘evidence’ would be subject to the scorn of the class, an immediate target for at least three angry quotations by the tutor from Nietzsche’s Gay Science, and without any possible retort of prejudice, marked down on the next essay.

How has neo-positivism (for Adorno, the epistemological basis of fascism) returned with a vengeance, and has become the modus operandi of the ‘knowledge society’? It is used by university managers as a template for all academic research, evaluation and management; for admissions policies, appointment policies, subject and faculty divisions of the University system, not least the REF, HEFCE and the funding agencies. The panel didn’t so effectively respond to some of these critical issues. Yet the panel did indeed offer some apposite insights and observations. Rick Rylance celebrated how the one recurring theme right now among policy wonks in Whitehall is interdisciplinarity, and in turn this offers a ‘huge’ opportunity for the academy (given how Whitehall is the last place in which models of interdisciplinarity will, or could, be innovated). However, here I could not help but think of the Whitehall revolution in 1998 and New Labour’s 'joined up policy making' and post-Major ‘anti-departmentalism’: an eternal return of the same, to (mis)quote Neitzsche. Rylance was optimistic that the sheer demands of the ‘knowledge economy’ have forced Whitehall to invest in interdisciplinarity, and in turn, research funding agencies will become more interconnected. We are truly entering a new age of the reengineering of the funding infrastructure for research, with glorious global horizons appearing in the process.

Inspiration indeed. As he noted himself, there remains a huge resistance to interdisciplinary – a lack of investment among individual academics for the necessary patterns intellectual interaction, new project formations or dynamic group work models and so on. However, it became clear to me that the disciplines as traditionally conceived were not, on the whole, regarded as a ‘problem’ or in any way bound up in the conditions for this ‘resistance’ to interdisciplinarity. For most of this event, the message being put out was that we must remain concerned for the essential and unashamed role of ‘disciplines’ – for intellectual training, academic skills, and the definition of research questions and problems. Disciplinarity is presupposed by interdisciplinarity, and so should remain the bedrock of academic life. Yet – and this was the challenge, obviating the potential conservatism such a position might entail – all disciplinarity should be perpetually subject to interdisciplinarity. All disciplines must be perpetually open to the challenges, innovations, interpretations and historicisation of their research questions and problems, and maintain a cognisance of a range of possible interpretations and outcomes. Yet, surely, said a colleague from CIM, we need institutional frameworks that facilitate this. The scenarios celebrated by the panel reflects a sector that currently favours ‘smooth’ innovations, not the kinds of friction and rapid mobility of real interdisciplinarity, which are really needed for substantial transformation. For this, universities should encourage multiple ‘joint’ appointments – where academics belong to two or more institutions (he remains with Columbia, but currently here in CIM). Material conditions and the problem of labour, indeed.

Another interesting viewpoint emerged from panel member and media don, Prof. Sarah Churchwell (UEA), who called for an interdisciplinarity of Intellectual Pluralism. This would necessitate our working at a critical ‘generalism’ and an acceptance of the generalist, not just specialists. In this line of thinking, we need to find ways of formulating particular research questions in terms ‘big enough’ to solicit a response from a range of disciplines across faculties. She cited Homi Bhabha’s recent seminar series at Harvard on the classical theme of ‘The Good Life’, inviting scholars from all disciplines to contribute. Churchwell’s contribution to the debate – if I am accurate here -- followed her assertion that the ‘inter’ dimension of interdisciplinarity challenges academics to learn how to gather and communicate with a ‘public’. This would entail, it seems, leaving behind the self-obsessed and convoluted academic sub-cultures of interdisciplinarity (the 1990s), and forge a more concentrated attention to the interrelations, interconnections and interactions of knowledge construction across the current institutional landscape. I would concur with another of her observations, that for too long, the social and intellectual processes of knowledge construction have been framed by individual careers and institutional elites. So apart from celebrating the IAS and its welcome support for interdisciplinary research, the general mood at this IAS event, among attendees at least, was one of a general scepticism. This scepticism, palpable in the discussion periods, were directed at the way the academy is shaped by a multitude of semi-concealed forces, only some of which are genuinely concerned with the formation of knowledge.

So, the ‘future’ of interdisciplinarity? We are struggling to understand its past.

Jonathan Vickery : 16 May 2015 14:54 |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Mike van Graan: Institute of Advanced Study Visiting Fellow

This last week, I was organsing seven events around special guest Mike van Graan. The Warwick Global Research Priority in International Development (GRP-ID), in response to my research and the new MA in Arts, Enterprise and Development, made this year's annual research theme ‘Cultural Economies and Cultural Activism’. Mike van Graan is a Warwick Institute of Advanced Study Visiting Fellow, and the IAS program funding made this itinerary possible, not forgetting the support of the GRP-ID – the leads, Prof. Shirin Rai (Dept. Politics) and Prof Ann Stewart (School of Law), and GRP-ID Coordinator Dr Rajnaara Akhtar. My PhD students Tomi Oladepo and Gabi Ferdinand, were similarly indispensible.

Mike van Graan is the Executive Director of the African Arts Institute and is the former Secretary General of the Arterial Network, a continent-wide network engaged in the African creative sector. He currently serves as a UNESCO Technical Expert on the 2005 UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. He runs his own consultancy and has played numerous roles in South Africa’s developing cultural sector. His plays include Die Generaal (The Generaal), winner of the Fleur du Cap Best New Script Award 2008; Brothers in Blood, a Market Theatre production that won the Naledi Theatre Award for Best New Play 2009, Lago’s Last Dance which premiered on the Main Programme at the National Arts Festival and was nominated in the Fleur du Cap Best New Script category, 2009; and many others, including Green Man Flashing (2004), which our students here at Warwick have recently engaged with. Last year some of us saw the production of his play Rainbow Scars, which was programmed as part of the Afrovibes Festival, performed in Birmingham and London. In 2013 Mike van Graan was appointed as the first Festival Playwright at the National Arts Festival in South Africa. Four of his works, including a new piece, Writer's Block, were showcased at the Festival.

I know Mike as a valued member of Global Cultural Economy Network, a group of researchers, entrepreneurs and consultants, many independent UNESCO advisors who are attempting to develop a new paradigm of cultural thinking for policy – local, national and global.

A full report will be written of the week of events, so here I will just summarise the events and their outcomes.

The week started with a seminar for early career researchers and PhD students: ‘Researching Contemporary Culture in Africa’. It, moreover, attracted some students from outside Warwick: Adeolu Adesanya from Leicester University gave a talk on researching business on the informal economy of the streets of Lagos (Nigeria). He was one of four students presenting in this morning-long seminar, which opened with Mike van Graan’s detailed and informative lecture on the practicalities and methodologies necessary for cultural research in Africa. This was followes by lunch, where the staff members, two of the PhD students, along with Visiting Fellow from China, Dr Xiao Bo, convened as the panel of judges on the Warwick GRP-ID Annual Photography Competition. From a short list of twelve, each of which were exhibited beforehand, we chose three winners – announced by me at the Wednesday evening public event where Mike van Graan presented the winner with prize. Before that, however, we held a full ‘videod’ ‘Interview with Mike van Graan’, where Dr Yvette Hutchison (a South African and expert in African theatre) and I interviewed Mike to an open audience. He discussed his career, mission, values and pioneering cultural work across the African continent.

On the Wednesday, Mike delivered The Annual Public Lecture in International Development, and attracting a wide public and campus audience. This event is important, (last year was the UK Givernment minister for ID: Rt Hon Justine Greening), it serves as a showcase for the GRP-ID research and our central concerns for critical thinking, humanities research, gender and rights, and a radical democracy approach to development. Mike was perfect for this occasion, as he presented the work of the AFAI in the context of the promotion of rights, democracy and diversity in post-Aparthied South Africa. His talk will hopefully form the basis of a Special Issue I will edit of the Journal of Law, Social Justice and Global Development.

On Thursday morning we gathered for an exploratory seminar, called ‘Research Opportunities in Africa’. This meeting was open to potential collaborators at Warwick (specifically the GRP network) and saw Mike discussing the possibility of a strategic partnership with the African Arts Institute. We decided to collaborate on (i) student internships and PhD residency; (ii) funded projects focussing on local cultural development in Africa in the context of global cultural policies (details forthcoming). This last subject was the theme of Mike’s address to the fellows of the IAS the following day. His address was titled, 'Creative Economies and Cultural Activism in contemporary Africa', where framed by the South Africa’s White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage (the first published in 1996, now revised), he explained how the political compromises of the government made cultural policy development fraught with contradictions.

Friday was our last, if intensive, day. The morning seminar was open to all University students but centrally featured students on my masters module ‘Culture and Social Innovation’ talking about our plans for a new international cultural festival in Coventry. The project is potentially huge, but in need of some advice and experience from the cultural sector veteran that Mike is. My role in this festival is to construct a 5-year strategic plan, (as well as mobilise the students), and aims within five years to be able to attract artists and musicians from all over the developing world.

After an agreeable lunch, the highlight of the week was the Friday afternoon ‘Global Cultural Economy Roundtable’. Apart from Mike, a special guest speaker was the UNESCO Chair in Cultural PoIicy for Germany, Professor Wolfgang Schneider. It also featured short position papers on the subject of culture as a resource for development: these were by Shane Homan (Monash), Anna Langdell (British Council), Tom Fleming (TFCC, London), Haili Ma (China Centre, Chester University) and my old PhD student Lorraine Lim (now Birkbeck College London). Following Mike’s introductory paper I will summarise the content of this debate as follows: First, we discussed how the concept of ‘culture’ can shift and change complexion depending on its role in policy discourse: so many assumptions that reinforce the semantics of culture are virtually meaningless in Africa. Second, cultural discourses are not merely intellectual, but embody the power and interests of institutions and agents of governance (including closed professional networks of elites); cultural discourse has evolved, whereby it animates national and international markets in various ways in relation to the production of cultural knowledge, creative goods and services. Third, there may seem like there exists a causal line from cultural discourse and cultural industries, but this is not so straightforward, and even where cultural discourse has relevance beyond a government signatory, it has to be understood, interpreted and implemented in local conditions, which, at least accross Africa, vary enormously. Fourth: global structural economic inequities and the lack of public infrastructure for culture in Africa, create a state of structutral dependency, where organisations, artists, agencies, and so on, work within the requirements and regulatory principles of their international funder and not local recipients or participants. With this state of affairs comes a passive acceptance of, rather than rigorous engagement with, cultural discourse and its industries. Lastly, the prevailing and dominant cultural discourses – as benign as they seem with their championing of rights and diversity – are embedded with world-views and embodied with assumptions biased in favour of certain Western paradigms. They cannot simply be taken as unequivocally constructive.

Jonathan Vickery : 12 May 2015 12:31 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Final Report meeting: Creative and Cultural Spillover Effects in Dortmund

Culture and creative industries and not just organisations and networks of individuals who generate certain kinds of potentially influential or enjoyable products/services. They involve social processes and generate cultural change, transmit knowledge, devise new forms of agency, communication and productivity, and so on. And this is not necessarily a good thing: in cities, so-called gentrification can be facilitated by spillover effects. Anyway, this is the (expansive) subject of the small research group I am a part of – and on Monday I attended the final ‘preliminary evidence’ meeting of this group, call it the European Spillover Effects research group. The main funding partners of this preliminary stage are European Centre for Creative Economy (Ruhr region, Germany), Arts Council England, Arts Council Ireland, European Cultural Foundation and a few other sleeping partners (i.e. who were not there), and 19 people turned up to meet in this design studio space in Dortmund (ecce’s city). This was the final and important meeting, where we were presented with the final report (by Tom Fleming Cultural Consultancy, who did all the hard work), and then decided how this would form the basis of a large research project. Last week, in fact, the EU URBact project on ‘Creative Spillover’ delivered its final report in Birmingham. We will, I hope, do something different.

The concept of ‘spillover’ has a complicated history, involving a broad range of subjects from the geo-politics of industrial development in European integration to the impact of media on social behaviour, to the more recent ‘effects’ of creative and cultural industries policy and practice. A lot of recent interest in spillover has been from the ‘cities’ fraternity, and so an extension of the kinds of past urban policy interest in clustering, value chains, the externalities of innovation-based industries, and the regeneration impacts of new start-ups involving all of the above. One issue that emerged was that our preliminary studies – involving my paper published by ecce (below) – were broad and exploratory and needed now to become focussed, driven with a specific agenda. (i.e. now that the European Commission has articulated interest in spillover, a number of other major research groups are emerging in the field). One aspect that distinguishes us, owing partly to Richard Russell’s leadership (Arts Council England), is the ‘public’ dimension of spillover – how can we identify a value chain trajectory for public investment? How can we trace the dynamic function of investment through policies for creative and cultural industries to actors or agencies, places or markets, and then the big contexts of sustainable societies and economies? What is the ‘public’ dimension of the innovation industries or the start up businesses whose identity and social function we so often reduce to goods/services, employment, revenues and taxes. However, in discussing this the issue of ‘place’ became problematic (given how spillover can happen a long way from immediate sites of production or location).

For me, delimiting the project needs to be done in response to specific EU policy fields – not just the obvious DG Urban then Culture, but perhaps to Territorial integration & cohesion, Citizenship/integration (multiculturalism), and even Foreign Relations and the Development Aid field, given how these kinds of dynamics could be crucial to small economies around the world trying to develop. Second, personally, I am interested in how ‘public’ investment could create the kinds of spaces, movements and organisations whose impact collapses the antagonism between the seemingly necessary binaries of private/public, commercial/arts, goods/services, social/cultural. But we first need to work through the ‘evidence library’ that the project has generated, and Tom Fleming’s initial analysis, and consider if we have the huge aspirations (spare time, energy, naivety..) for an EU funding bid.

http://www.e-c-c-e.de/index.php?id=232&L=1

http://www.e-c-c-e.de/fileadmin/content_bilder/Aktivitaeten/Europa/Entwurf_EN_RZ.pdf

Jonathan Vickery : 28 Apr 2015 17:38 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Selfie Citizenship: Visibility, control and the mediated self

Our IATL-funded work on developing the Mediated Self Project module continues. Last Thursday this took me to Manchester to attend a workshop on the theme of Selfie Citizenship sponsored by Digital Innovation at MMU and the Visual Social Media Lab at Sheffield University. The event showcased the work being produced by a network of scholars, from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and interests, on the implications of the growth of the forms of visualisation and representation associated with ‘selfie’ cultures. Readily dismissed – like so many aspects of popular creative expression – as indicative of the frivolous fluff of contemporary life, selfie-culture emerged from the presentations and discussions here as a compelling and serious object for scholarly analysis. As well as paying attention to the explicit role of the selfie in expressions of dissent and resistance, the seminar also shed light on the selfie’s place in the broader power politics of digital and technological cultures.

For me there were two recurring themes from the day which can help us in framing our module on the mediated self. The first was the significance of the notion of visibility. Selfies can be interpreted, as Adi Kuntsman implied in discussing her research into the practices of serving Israeli soldiers, as declarations of witness to events, aimed at an audience beyond immediate locales and frontiers. Following Lauren Berlant, she suggested the social media circulation of selfies from actors at the heart of globally significant events can, for better or worse, reflect an affective announcement of a kind of immediate presence on this stage. This kind of visibility was evident in other presentations too. Crystal Abidin explored the ways in which a specific Singapore MP managed his visual image through regular selfies of his life away from his public role, drawing on the visual tropes and techniques of micro-celebrity learned from young Singapore women, rather than from the serious, patrician modes of visualisation that are more common in established Singaporean media political culture. In a context in which the stakes of public political critique remain high, this was a crafting of the political self as ‘just like us’, with all the potential ambiguities of that claim. Simon Faulkner explored the relations between selfie culture and the histories of visualisation evident in photo-journalism, using the examples of the blurring of the ‘professional’ and social media practices of a photographer working in Palestine. Here the ‘traditional’ role of the photograph as part of truth-telling witness is both ‘spreadable’ in ways which make connections with political struggles in other times and places, but also personalises these struggles in interesting ways.

The second, related theme was of control, and specifically about the hidden infrastructures through which our digital lives, including selfie-cultures - are managed and circulated. Farida Vis reflected on the hidden and proprietorial role of algorithms –specifically Facebook’s EdgeRank - in determining which images and items appear on, or disappear from, user newsfeeds. As such feeds – and their equivalents in other platforms - become more taken-for-granted and relied on as sources of information the control of the means of circulation becomes crucial. This makes what seem to be arcane technical changes to platforms potentially hugely significant in shaping our knowledge of the world. Sanjay Sharma’s research on ‘Black Twitter’ and the phenomenon of users and activists deliberately ‘gaming’ the system through deliberate and repeated sharing to inflate the prominence of trending hashtags reflecting African American issues in an ‘attention economy’ perhaps exemplifies this struggle for control. I’m pleased to say that Sanjay will be joining us and our student stakeholders for further discussion at our June workshop.

Jill Walker Rettberg’s presenation brought these themes of visibility and control together in drawing on and developing the insights from her book Seeing Ourselves through Technology, which is highly likely to find its way onto our reading list. It reminded us that the drive to represent and narrate the self has a long history. The particular technological conditions we find ourselves in allow both for the ready dispersion of the means to represent the self, but also the infrastructure to make those representations visible. They are shared with other people but also, through the rise of facial recognition software and the algorithmic sorting of data, visible to machines concerned with either commercial exploitation or surveillance of these selves. There is a dystopian aspect to this kind of narrative and some of Rettberg’s examples (of the life insurance company that offered discounts to fitbit users who met their targets, or the increasingly sophisticated modes of child monitoring that might normalise wearable surveillance technologies) certainly give pause for thought. As with the development of media technologies down the ages, though, paying attention to how people actually live with, negotiate and even subvert these technologies in their daily lives might temper overly pessimistic readings. As well as keeping an analytic and critical eye on the implications of these developments it seems as important to keep asking what it is about people’s lives which makes the forms of visibility and control afforded by these technologies valuable and attractive to them.

Thanks to the organisers and presenters for such an interesting and thought-provoking day.

David Wright : 21 Apr 2015 18:06 |  Tags: Media Mediated Self Project Technology; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Global Cultural Economy seminar at the University of Tilburg

Last Monday I attended a sub-meeting of the Global Cultural Economy Network (GCEN) – an informal group of policy experts concerned to help re-frame current debates around culture and economy. The meeting was at the University of Tilburg (Netherlands); it was not a mainstream gathering, which comprises all or most of the Network’s 30 members, but a seminar organised by one of them, Professor Hans Mommaas (one of Europe’s leading scholars on urban culture and politics).

The meeting revolved around a discussion paper by Justin O’Connor, which started with the statement ‘Creative Economy is not Working’. Its animating contention is that cultural policy has become subsumed in the discourses and priorities of ‘creative industries’ and ‘creative economy’, whose strong concept of ‘economy’ has steadily eclipsed many dimensions of culture. Indeed it has disempowered ‘culture’ itself as a form of political agency. This ‘economy’ concept is not general, benign and self-evident. It is specific – deceptively so. That ‘the economy’ has become a discrete and independent entity is a theoretical move of huge social significance, and is central to a political imaginary that has devalued the aspects of life most important, aspects that once constituted a ‘public’ realm. 

That the hegemonic power of the concept of ‘the economy’ has serious implications for our concept of culture, is obvious (the way the discourse of economics has become the central actor in politics and government globally is arguably in inverse proportion to the decline of the public realm). It appeals to an irrepressible sense of logic (‘we all have to earn a living…’ etc.). What is not so obvious is how the substantive meaning of our historical concept of ‘culture’ has become attenuated – at least in the face of the last few decades and massive increase in the investment in, uses of, and public popularity of the arts and culture. We have larger cultural events and festivals, exhibitions and art museums, landmark public architecture, multi-million pound funding schemes. Culture is no longer framed by heritage, but is now on the political agenda; so what is the problem? Indeed, a few academics and policy makers at the seminar were puzzled at what they saw as the anti-neoliberal angst expressed in Justin’s paper. Is this not the disgruntled left, nostalgic for post-World War Two welfarism, and an irrational opposition to markets of any kind – where do we go with that in cultural policy?

But Justin’s paper was more than just a paper; it articulated the research agenda of the Network, and that agenda is diverse given the diversity of its membership. The fundamental concern relates to how the capitalist economic triumphalism of the past thirty years has generated rhetoric, professional discourses and value systems that have permeated our entire society. And this was at the same time as failing to deliver on any of its promises (indeed, delivered inequality, instability and a public realm that is incapable of functioning without specific and limited projects that involve huge and regular injections of money). ‘Creativity’ has been wrested from culture itself, and has been used to politicise and re-frame certain areas of industry. ‘Creative economy’ as a term represents a new governance of culture, where strategic management and IP have re-ordered cultural production so that what is validated tends to the professional, specialist, organisation-bound or institutional and economically productive. The validation of the non-tangible, or nonmaterial, dimensions of culture has evaporated – the role of culture in the local ‘everyday’, generating social conviviality or community, philosophical beliefs, identities, education, a diversity of expressions, individuality, modes of engagement with nature or the urban environment, and so on. This is not to say that the harnessing culture to economy has not generated a massive amount of productivity – not least active audiences and social engagement, interdisciplinarity and new technologies, and so on. This is not an old leftist argument against markets -- there were markets before capitalism. Justin’s discussion paper states ‘We cannot see culture as the ontological space of value and meaning, as opposed to that of necessity or instrumentality’. This is not an argument for a culture set apart from economy, which would hail the return of the parochial days of close communities and state funded national monoculture. The issue is more that culture itself – its facility for empowerment, political agency, social value – has been divested of its ability to imagine aspects of another life, or meanings for a better world (not an ideal world, but a world as productive and functional as this one).

What is interesting to me in this now-familiar narrative is the way cultural ‘autonomy’ has not been dissolved by the commodifying power of the creative economy regime, but preserved – our fine museums, archives, opera houses, cultural institutes have seen cuts, like everyone else, yet remain as powerful actors in the national cultural sector. And yet, is our historically rich cultural sector generating a new ‘imaginary’ that can challenge the claim of the economic powers that be over social identity, meaning and value? Are they really attempting to construct a life worth living, or just making the life we have been given more humane, intellectually enjoyable and upwardly mobile?

Jonathan Vickery : 20 Mar 2015 17:39 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Spillover Effects in Europe

Tuesday I was at the British Council, where we used their Board Room (with a great view of Whitehall !) for the second meeting of the European spillover research group. The first meeting was at the Forum D’Avignon Ruhr last year, where I chaired an exploratory meeting on putting together a large research project. My paper was published from that, see here: [It has become the first of a series of papers called ‘To be Debated’, hence the slightly cryptic cover].
http://www.e-c-c-e.de/en/

This Tuesday’s meeting – called ‘Preliminary Evidence of Spillover Effects in Europe – Interim meeting – was organized by the group’s current funders, the European centre for creative economy Dortmund, with Arts Council England; other partners include the Irish Arts Council, Creative England, and the European Creative Business Network (based at Brussels). At the meeting were representatives from the British Council, Nesta, the Norwegian Arts Council and the European Cultural Foundation.

‘Spillover’ (a bad name in my opinion, but unfortunately established now it’s in the sights of EU policy makers) doesn’t involve spilling your coffee over the person you’re sitting next to. Oh No. It’s serious business – well, we hope it will be. In involves the development, dynamics and outcomes that have been previously referred to as ‘externalities’, ‘crossovers’ or that awful term ‘knowledge transfer’. To my mind, it should involve the most compelling dimensions of the creative and cultural industries – their ability to shape places, spaces, subjectivities and our social horizon of imagination. And that includes enterprise and industry as much as social groups or communities. The new EU ‘Creative Europe’ (2014-20) programme has unfortunately ditched the ‘citizenship’ aims of traditional European cultural policy, but also opened up a new front in enterprise, the creative industries and other SME activity (particularly in the context of EU urban policy). In that sense it is attempting to dovetail culture with with the Europe 2020 Strategy of ‘Innovation Union’, where ‘innovation’ is defined as any process or strategic use of cultural, social and urban resources (not just technological or manufacturing development). This policy thinking has a provenance of course: for example, ‘An integrated industrial policy for the globalisation era’ (COM(2010)614), cited cultural and creative industries as sources and providers of innovation (not just social benefits). Altogether, there is a push for new policy models of an expanded and engaged cultural sector, but where cultural policy is not so good at engagement beyond the older paradigms of ‘benefits’ or impacts.

Tom Fleming Associates have been appointed as research leaders, and are building an evidence library devised a preliminary methodology. For me, the preliminary task is twofold: first in differentiating the study of ‘spillover’ from the previous discourses of benefit, impact, transference and value (along with all their economic theory references points); and second, understanding how spillover is both intentional and unintentional (as well as both positive and negative), and not simply an ‘object’ of analysis, but a policy construct. As defined by Fleming, we will be concentrating on knowledge, production, and network spillovers – but raises a question. I don’t know about you, but when we get spills, they are not so easily categorized.. they are a bit of a mess. In the study of the creative industries, we have had complexity theory (e.g. Nesta’s ‘dynamic mapping’: (Bakhshi ‎2013)). When is someone going to come up with ‘mess theory’?

Jonathan Vickery : 19 Feb 2015 15:27 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Global City — the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies in London

Warwick is increasingly teaching in London. And this term saw 23 of our students from the Centre follow the module The Global City -- along with several tourists who think I am an official tour guide!

We are undertaking half the module on location in central London. The rationale is that on many of the indices ranking the ‘global cities’ of the world, London comes top or near-top in all of them. And furthermore, London has a rich a complex culture, along with some suitably complex cultural policies. Our theoretical framework, however, is largely derived from the International Development discourse on creative economy – looking at questions of social justice, global urbanization, democracy and rights to the city, as well as the cultural policy interests in the creative industries and arts institutions.

SEE our Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Global-City-Culture-Development/1594597290774228?ref=hl

Our field trip itinerary is as follows:

Field Trip 1:Walking the City: the semiotics of the Global cityscape: from the BBC HQ, Langham Place, to Oxford St and then Regent’s Street (global brands; economic globalization) – Leicester Sq. – St Martins-in-the-Fields – Trafalgar Square – The Mall – Whitehall (Government) – Parliament Square and ending up outside the old County Hall at the London Eye.

Field Trip 2:Memory City: the cultural politics of history & heritage: this started at the still amazing cultural centre of the Barbican – then onto the Museum of London (keepers of the city’s memory) –– then through the City of London (the Square Mile) seeing all the new post-postmodern architecture – Past Tower of London and ending up at Tower Bridge.

Field Trip 3:Cultural Capital: competitive urban cultural policy: we started at the National Gallery (and why a global city posseses a ‘national’ gallery full of art from other countries), and onto the South Bank Centre, which is an historically fascinating lesson in urban cultural regeneration – then walking down Bankside to Shakespeare’s Globe (replica heritage), spending most of our time at the postmodern cathedral of art, Tate Modern.

Field Trip 4: UrbanCreative Economy: the spaces and places of the creative industries: this seminar is a comparative assessment of the growth of London’s creative industries, looking at Camden Lock – Soho – Covent Garden – then Hoxton.

Field Trip 5: Mega-event City and the fate of ‘the local’: the London 2012 Olympics and the East End Stratford Town: no contemporary tour around the cultural development of the metropolis could by-pass the huge Olympic urban regeneration project and the now named Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Jonathan Vickery : 09 Feb 2015 17:26 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Beginning 'The Mediated Self Project'

Yesterday Jo Garde-Hansen and I made the first steps on our IATL funded development of a new MA option module, The Mediated Self Project. The module – initially to be piloted to CCPS students in 2015-16 with the option of a wider audience in subsequent years – aims to combine critical and theoretical perspectives on the forms of knowledge produced and required by the digital economy with some practical reflection on the skills needed to manage the various selves which can inhabit that economy successfully. The module also aims to develop ways of teaching and assessment which take better account of these digital forms of literacy.

We began this process by taking over a session of The Global Audience module. In a sense it was a perfect place to start. That module had contained a session on the ‘creative audience’ which focussed on the narratives emerging from what used to be called Web 2.0 – about the interactive audience, participatory culture and the pro-sumer - and the relations between these stories and older stories about the apparently mass and inert media audience of the past. Both these sets of stories have taken on legendary, mythical aspects but there are some interesting affinities between them and emerging stories about the ways in which we are assumed to live in the digital age. One of the things we talk a lot about in the Centre is the relationship between theory and practice. This module is going to push the boundaries of this distinction, recognising that there is a level at which the theoretical and the practical question is the same. It is ‘how do we live’? What kinds of skills do we need to make sense of the symbolic and technological world around us? And what does it mean to be able to navigate its complexities successfully? The Mediated Self Project aims to provide some space to answer these questions.

The centre piece of our discussion was a presentation from Amber Thomas from the Academic Technology team in ITS. Amber sketched out a frame through which we might situate ourselves in the digital world, drawing on the distinction identified by David White between digital visitors and digital residents. Understanding what is at stake in moving between these states in our personal and professional lives seems likely to be important in shaping the module’s content and mode of delivery. We’re hoping to call more on the expertise of colleagues like Amber, from Warwick and beyond, within the field of academic technology, where these debates are well established and on-going.

After outlining our plans relating to the module content (including issues relating to The Quantified Self, the Reputational Economy, the Campaigning Self and the distinctions between Print and Digital forms of Literacy) we asked students to reflect on what they might want to learn from such a module in this area and indeed what they consider to be the pitfalls of teaching and learning in this field. Amongst the topics that emerged as of interest included privacy (relating to a general anxiety about managing past versions of the self online as students move into professional life.) and, happily for me, taste and how it is produced and performed algorithmically. Pitfalls included concerns about the balance between theoretical abstraction and practical instruction and one – admittedly from me – about how new forms of literacy can be assessed. So many of the established forms of assessment (the exam and certainly the written assignment) are based on a vision of print literacy based around a single authorial voice in a formal static text. Digital literacy involves multiple voices, sharing and collaboration and even the creative manipulation of images and sound. How can these forms be assessed in ways which preserve the standards of critique, rigour, evidence and argument required for serious academic study?

Our next step is to recruit student participants to help us think all these things through, and to invite experts from within and beyond the University to get together in the Spring and Summer to contribute to our discussions. We’ll keep the blog updated with our progress.

David Wright : 04 Feb 2015 13:16 |  Tags: Cultural Policy Studies; ITS Media; Mediated Self Project Technology; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem