All entries for Tuesday 17 December 2019

Forum on Global Cultural Management

Shanghai Jiaotong University 7-9th December 2019

Warwick is now an official research partner of Jiaotong University, but my visits to Jiaotong go back further than this, to another ‘forum’ — the Cultural Economy Forum of 2010. It was after this forum that I collaborated on the Shanghai City Lab (with Monash University). The new Forum on Global Cultural Management attracted over 100 top cultural researchers from all over China, and is now an established annual event, positioning Jiaotong as central to national policy as well as scholarly debates. I wasn’t quite prepared for TV-style glamour, but had to look official as possible as one of the keynote speakers who opened the conference.

The foreign delegation, which included policy consultants and researchers from Europe, Africa, and Australasia, preceded and postceded the conference with two day long summits, heavily punctuated by restaurants and cultural site visits of course. In the words of the preparatory document we authored, Cultural Management is an emerging global field of practice and research, with the new forum re-defining Cultural Management for the 21st Century. We began the task (hopefully moving shortly to an edited book) of scoping out the new Cultural Management as both local and global, strategic and creative, institutional and enterprising, as heritage, tradition and community, contemporary and creative industry. The manager is cultural producer, intermediator, interlocutor and digital innovator, understands value, environmental conditions, the social and policy landscape, the discourse of global interconnectedness, and a need to cooperative dialogue and sustainable development. Cultural managers today increasingly work in international projects, intersecting with a range of global challenges. Our conceptual framework for making this intelligible to a broad audience of public officials and cultural workers was the UNESCO managed 2005 Convention for the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, the preeminent tool of global cultural policy. It is also part of the ongoing task of creating a shared vision for a common global humanity that is part of China’s vision for contemporary culture. Watch this space.

Jonathan Vickery : 17 Dec 2019 16:24 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem