Public Engagement in the Arts: A Review of Recent Literature

In recent years, research has found that across the US, arts audiences are declining while arts participation is on the rise. How can both be true at the same time? This literature review on Public Engagement in the Arts that explores this question. It also delves intothe different ways in which "public engagement" can be defined and practiced,the purposes public engagement has been used for in the arts, andhow the terms "audience" and "participant" have evolved and blurred over time.This literature review also places public engagement in the context of one of the most urgent conversations taking place in the arts and culture field today, that of cultural equity and inclusion. How can we ensure that everyone in our community has access to the opportunities and benefits provided by the arts? As this review discusses, public engagement is one tool available to artists, arts organizations and arts educators to help them work toward that goal

Los Angeles County Arts Commission: Public Engagement in the Arts - A Review of Recent Literature

Do all Americans have equal access to the arts? Are the arts accessible and inclusive for all communities? National rates of arts participation as measured by attendance at live benchmark events have been trending down for the past few decades. Consequently, a narrative of arts decline in the US has been largely accepted, even as some accounts show cultural engagement experiencing a renaissance enabled by advanced communication technologies and changing demographics.This report, informed by a review of practitioner and academic literature, charts the concerns of arts stakeholders surrounding public arts engagement since about 2000, beginning with the discovery of a statistically significant decline in benchmark attendance as observed in the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). It also traces the role of the "informal arts" (folk, traditional and avocational arts) in broadening the definition of arts and cultural participation.Authors Henry Jenkins and Vanessa Bertossi (2007) have suggested that we are living in a "new participatory culture" distinguished by four factors:1. Low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement;2. Strong support for creating and sharing what one creates with others;3. Transmission of knowledge and skills through informal mentorship networks; and4. A degree of social currency and sense of connectedness among participantsThis new culture makes measuring arts participation more difficult because traditional distinctions between amateur and professional, hobbyist and artist, and consumer and producer are blurring. Broadening the definition of arts participation to include leisure time investment in creative pursuits and arts-making helps enlarge the definition of art's value to society (Ramirez, 2000). Expanding our sense of "what counts" initiates new conversations by reframing the old question "Why aren't people attending?" as "What are people doing with their creativity-focused leisure time?" New cultural indicators are revealing the value of arts and culture in people's everyday lives, shifting the narrative about arts participation in the early twenty-first century from decline to resurgence.Even as both the concept and measurement of "engagement" in the arts has evolved over time, the understanding of the purpose of that engagement has varied. For some organizations, engagement has meant creating new inroads to existing programming. For others, engagement has meant developing new programs to capture the attention of new audiences. In 2015, this conversation took a new direction as people moved from talking about engagement as a process to focusing instead on a key outcome: cultural equity and inclusion. In Los Angeles County, as well as across the U.S., arts organizations began to focustheir attention on ensuring that everyone has access to the benefits offered by the arts. Viewed through this lens, this literature review should be seen as a companion – a prequel, even – to the literature review on cultural equity and inclusion published by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission in March 2016

Using the Stallings Observation System to Investigate Time on Task in Four Countries

This paper presents the history of the Stallings Observation System (SOS) and describes the adaptation of the SOS instrument, training for its use in international settings, and results from four countries of the World Bank International Time on Task (ITOT) project. The ITOT project had three major goals: 1) to discover how instructional time is used at different levels in certain countries, particularly in rural and low income areas; 2) to identify obstacles to optimal use of instructional time; and 3) to encourage governments to take the necessary measures to provide students with optimal time for learning . In order to address ITOT at the classroom level, a pilot study in Tunisia was conducted that targeted four related objectives: 1)adaptation of the Stallings snapshot observation instrument for use in project classrooms; 2) design and implementation of training for observers; 3) determination of reliability and validity of observation procedures; and 4) generation of a sample profile of classrooms in a Tunisian elementary school. This paper summarizes the training and findings from the initial pilot study of time usage at the classroom level conducted in Tunisia in January, 2004 and the training and results from subsequent ITOT studies in four countries: Tunisia, Morocco, Ghana, and Brazil. More specifically, sections of the paper provide an overview of the research on effective use of instructional time using the Stallings instrument, description of the adaptation of the Stallings Snapshot observation instrument for use in the project, a summary of the training and procedures developed for the pilot study and implemented in four countries, and the results and conclusions from the observational studies in four countries

Masters of the Universe: Bid Rigging by Private Equity Firms in Multibillion Dollar LBOs

In the first successful case of its kind, a class action alleging widespread collusion in the market for leveraged buyouts, some of the world’s largest private equity firms settled Dahl v. Bain Capital Partners, LLC for $590.5 million. The case was unique not only for its size and the fact that it involved complex financial transactions instead of a typical commodity, but also because the claimants used auction theory to demonstrate both the “plus” factors required to prove antitrust injury and the resulting damages. Economic analyses show that the cost to shareholders of collusion in the eight litigated multi-billion dollar leveraged buyout transactions approached$12 billion. The use of empirical economic analysis in antitrust litigation is now de rigueur. Courts expect it, and litigants have an array of econometricians available who understand both how to work with data and antitrust doctrine. In “ordinary” commodities price fixing cases, plaintiffs and defendants are expected to engage experts who gather transaction data and apply regression theory and other economic analyses to contest whether it is possible to demonstrate injury, impact, and damages. Dahl was not an ordinary case in that it involved neither a commodity nor a sellers’ cartel. Instead, it involved a buyers’ cartel which, Plaintiffs alleged, conspired to drive down the price of a number of unique, large LBOs during the mid-2000s. Additionally, the case was notable because of the Plaintiffs’ decision to use the auction theory to demonstrate the existence of antitrust violations and the extent of damage

A large-scale genome-wide association study meta-analysis of cannabis use disorder

Summary Background Variation in liability to cannabis use disorder has a strong genetic component (estimated twin and family heritability about 50–70%) and is associated with negative outcomes, including increased risk of psychopathology. The aim of the study was to conduct a large genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify novel genetic variants associated with cannabis use disorder. Methods To conduct this GWAS meta-analysis of cannabis use disorder and identify associations with genetic loci, we used samples from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Substance Use Disorders working group, iPSYCH, and deCODE (20 916 case samples, 363 116 control samples in total), contrasting cannabis use disorder cases with controls. To examine the genetic overlap between cannabis use disorder and 22 traits of interest (chosen because of previously published phenotypic correlations [eg, psychiatric disorders] or hypothesised associations [eg, chronotype] with cannabis use disorder), we used linkage disequilibrium score regression to calculate genetic correlations. Findings We identified two genome-wide significant loci: a novel chromosome 7 locus (FOXP2, lead single-nucleotide polymorphism [SNP] rs7783012; odds ratio [OR] 1·11, 95% CI 1·07–1·15, p=1·84 × 10−9) and the previously identified chromosome 8 locus (near CHRNA2 and EPHX2, lead SNP rs4732724; OR 0·89, 95% CI 0·86–0·93, p=6·46 × 10−9). Cannabis use disorder and cannabis use were genetically correlated (rg 0·50, p=1·50 × 10−21), but they showed significantly different genetic correlations with 12 of the 22 traits we tested, suggesting at least partially different genetic underpinnings of cannabis use and cannabis use disorder. Cannabis use disorder was positively genetically correlated with other psychopathology, including ADHD, major depression, and schizophrenia. Interpretation These findings support the theory that cannabis use disorder has shared genetic liability with other psychopathology, and there is a distinction between genetic liability to cannabis use and cannabis use disorder. Funding National Institute of Mental Health; National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; National Institute on Drug Abuse; Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine and the Centre for Integrative Sequencing; The European Commission, Horizon 2020; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; Health Research Council of New Zealand; National Institute on Aging; Wellcome Trust Case Control Consortium; UK Research and Innovation Medical Research Council (UKRI MRC); The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation; National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders; Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA); National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering; National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Australia; Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program of the University of California; Families for Borderline Personality Disorder Research (Beth and Rob Elliott) 2018 NARSAD Young Investigator Grant; The National Child Health Research Foundation (Cure Kids); The Canterbury Medical Research Foundation; The New Zealand Lottery Grants Board; The University of Otago; The Carney Centre for Pharmacogenomics; The James Hume Bequest Fund; National Institutes of Health: Genes, Environment and Health Initiative; National Institutes of Health; National Cancer Institute; The William T Grant Foundation; Australian Research Council; The Virginia Tobacco Settlement Foundation; The VISN 1 and VISN 4 Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Centers of the US Department of Veterans Affairs; The 5th Framework Programme (FP-5) GenomEUtwin Project; The Lundbeck Foundation; NIH-funded Shared Instrumentation Grant S10RR025141; Clinical Translational Sciences Award grants; National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute; National Institute of General Medical Sciences.Peer reviewe

Shared genetic risk between eating disorder- and substance-use-related phenotypes:Evidence from genome-wide association studies

First published: 16 February 202

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

A large-scale genome-wide association study meta-analysis of cannabis use disorder

Background: Variation in liability to cannabis use disorder has a strong genetic component (estimated twin and family heritability about 50-70%) and is associated with negative outcomes, including increased risk of psychopathology. The aim of the study was to conduct a large genome-wide association study (GWAS) to identify novel genetic variants associated with cannabis use disorder. Methods: To conduct this GWAS meta-analysis of cannabis use disorder and identify associations with genetic loci, we used samples from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium Substance Use Disorders working group, iPSYCH, and deCODE (20 916 case samples, 363 116 control samples in total), contrasting cannabis use disorder cases with controls. To examine the genetic overlap between cannabis use disorder and 22 traits of interest (chosen because of previously published phenotypic correlations [eg, psychiatric disorders] or hypothesised associations [eg, chronotype] with cannabis use disorder), we used linkage disequilibrium score regression to calculate genetic correlations. Findings: We identified two genome-wide significant loci: a novel chromosome 7 locus (FOXP2, lead single-nucleotide polymorphism [SNP] rs7783012; odds ratio [OR] 1·11, 95% CI 1·07-1·15, p=1·84 × 10-9) and the previously identified chromosome 8 locus (near CHRNA2 and EPHX2, lead SNP rs4732724; OR 0·89, 95% CI 0·86-0·93, p=6·46 × 10-9). Cannabis use disorder and cannabis use were genetically correlated (rg 0·50, p=1·50 × 10-21), but they showed significantly different genetic correlations with 12 of the 22 traits we tested, suggesting at least partially different genetic underpinnings of cannabis use and cannabis use disorder. Cannabis use disorder was positively genetically correlated with other psychopathology, including ADHD, major depression, and schizophrenia. Interpretation: These findings support the theory that cannabis use disorder has shared genetic liability with other psychopathology, and there is a distinction between genetic liability to cannabis use and cannabis use disorder

Transancestral GWAS of alcohol dependence reveals common genetic underpinnings with psychiatric disorders

Liability to alcohol dependence (AD) is heritable, but little is known about its complex polygenic architecture or its genetic relationship with other disorders. To discover loci associated with AD and characterize the relationship between AD and other psychiatric and behavioral outcomes, we carried out the largest genome-wide association study to date of DSM-IV-diagnosed AD. Genome-wide data on 14,904 individuals with AD and 37,944 controls from 28 case-control and family-based studies were meta-analyzed, stratified by genetic ancestry (European, n = 46,568; African, n = 6,280). Independent, genome-wide significant effects of different ADH1B variants were identified in European (rs1229984; P = 9.8 x 10(-13)) and African ancestries (rs2066702; P = 2.2 x 10(-9)). Significant genetic correlations were observed with 17 phenotypes, including schizophrenia, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, depression, and use of cigarettes and cannabis. The genetic underpinnings of AD only partially overlap with those for alcohol consumption, underscoring the genetic distinction between pathological and nonpathological drinking behaviors.Peer reviewe