The practice of cultural ecology: network connectivity in the creative economy

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. ABSTRACT: This paper reflects on approaches to collaborative knowledge exchange projects between UK universities and the creative economy. It develops a preliminary account of cultural ecology as a systematic approach to producing impact in the creative economy. It argues that such an approach is a powerful way to aggregate micro-businesses and small and medium sized enterprises in a meaningful network of new relationships. The paper uses social network analysis software to begin to visualise the pattern of relationships that constitute the ecosystem. The paper reports on the work of the Research and Enterprise for Arts and Creative Technologies Hub, one of four Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy established by the Arts and Humanities Research Council

Commercials, careers and culture: travelling salesmen in Britain 1890s-1930s

Within the lower middle-class, British commercial travellers established a strong fraternal culture before 1914. This article examines their interwar experiences in terms of income, careers, and associational culture. It demonstrates how internal labour markets operated, identifies the ways in which commercial travellers interpreted their role, and explores their social and political attitudes

“Working the System”—British American Tobacco's Influence on the European Union Treaty and Its Implications for Policy: An Analysis of Internal Tobacco Industry Documents

Katherine Smith and colleagues investigate the ways in which British American Tobacco influenced the European Union Treaty so that new EU policies advance the interests of major corporations, including those that produce products damaging to health

Contributing to the creative economy imaginary: universities and the creative sector

© 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This paper explores the relationship between the creative economy and universities. As funders, educators and research bodies, universities have a complicated relationship with the creative economy. They propagate its practice, ‘buying-in’ to the rhetoric and models of creative value, particularly in teaching, research and knowledge exchange. Third mission activities also play a role, seeking to affect change in the world ‘outside’ academia through collaboration, partnerships, commercialisation and social action. For arts and humanities disciplines, these practices have focused almost exclusively on the creative sector in recent years. This paper asks how the third mission has been a site where universities have modified their function in relation to the creative economy. It considers the mechanisms by which universities have been complicit in propagating the notion of the creative economy, strengthening particular constructions of the idea at the level of policy and everyday practice. It also briefly asks how a focus on alternative academic practice and institutional forms might offer possibilities for developing a more critical creative economy. The argument made is that the university sector is an important agent in the shaping and performance of the creative economy, and that we should take action if we wish to produce a more diverse, equitable space for learning, researching, and being under the auspices of ‘creativity’

The work of the audience: visual matrix methodology in museums

Visual matrix methodology has been designed for researching cultural imaginaries. It is an image-led, group-based method that creates a “third space” research setting to observe audience groups re-enacting lived experience of an event or process that takes place in the third space of a cultural setting. In this article the method is described through its use in relation to an art-science exhibition, Human + Future of the species, where three audience groups with investments in technology worked with exhibition material to achieve a complex, ambivalent state of mind regarding technological futures. The visual matrix has been designed to capture the affective and aesthetic quality of audience engagement in third space by showing what audiences do with what is presented to them. We argue that such methodologies are useful for museums as they grapple with their role as sites where citizens not only engage in dialogue with one another but actively re-work their imaginaries of the future

Statistics and State-istics : exclusion categories in the population census (Belgium, 1846-1930)

Peer reviewe

From training to artisanal practice : rethinking choreographic relationships in modern dance

In the first part of the twentieth century early modern dancers created both a new art form and the forms of group social organisation that were its condition of possibility. This paper critically examines the balletic and disciplinary ‘training’ model of dancer formation and proposes that the assumption of training in dance can obscure other ways of understanding dance-making relationships and other values in early modern dance. An ‘artisanal’ mode of production and knowledge transmission based on a non-binary relationship between ‘master’ and apprentice and occurring in a quasi-domestic and personalised space of some intimacy is proposed as a more pertinent way to think the enabling conditions of modern dance creation

Embedding arts and humanities in the creative economy: the role of graduates in the UK

The recent change in funding structure in the UK higher education system has fuelled an animated debate about the role that arts and humanities (A&H) subjects play not only within higher education but more broadly in the society and the economy. The debate has engaged with a variety of arguments and perspectives, from the intrinsic value of A&H, to their contribution to the broader society and their economic impact, particularly in relation to the creative economy, through knowledge exchange activities. The paper argues that in the current debate very little attention has been placed on the role that A&H graduates play in the economy, through their work after graduation, and specifically in the creative economy. Using Higher Education Statistical Agency data, we analyse the performance of A&H graduates (compared with other graduates) and particularly explore how embedded they are with the creative economy and its associated industries. The results highlight a complex intersection of different subdisciplines of the A&H with the creative economy but also reveal the salary gap and unstable working conditions experienced by graduates in this field

A reflective perspective on the challenges facing research-led teaching in the performing and creative arts

This article provides a reflective perspective on the role that research-led teaching plays in the development of future arts workers in higher education. It explores the challenges faced by lecturers developing curricula in the performing and creative arts and argues that the increasing focus on employability can conflict with universities’ traditional aim of developing conceptual and critical thinkers. The article charges that the UK’s higher education sector is rapidly transforming itself into a two-tier system, which is serving to dichotomise vocational and academic learning even further. It concludes with a call for universities, students and employers to reject the false dichotomy between vocational and academic learning and perceive education in a more holistic, longitudinal sense, which might in turn develop more balanced graduates who excel in networked knowledge, conceptual and theoretical imagination and critical, lateral thinking