Check out a new book by Dr. Victoria Durrer and Dr. Raphaela Henze: Managing Culture: Reflecting On Exchange In Global Times. With a focus on the fine, visual and performing arts, the book positions arts and cultural management educators and practitioners as active agents whose decisions, actions and interactions represent how we, as a society, approach, relate to, and understand ourselves and others.
Praise for Managing Culture: Reflecting on Exchange in Global Times:
This wide-ranging compendium of original texts on cultural management has its origins in an academic network Brokering Intercultural Exchange [managingculture.net]. The title, ‘Managing Culture’, speaks of a dynamic context-sensitive understand of ‘management’ — less the procedural ‘science’ taught in business schools, than an historically evolving series of capabilities and context-specific competencies. In this, the book is equally relevant to arts administration, heritage, curating, cultural diplomacy, community arts, arts marketing and advocacy. It also extends beyond the arts per se, to policy, research and pedagogy, and each chapter in his volume carefully frames its subject and research questions with theory, a methodology, and range of empirical reference (programmes, policy schemes, organisations, and so on).
The book’s Contents page helpfully sets out how each article covers the subject-area more or less systematically. While the book does not pretend to universally applicability, it aims for diversity and voices are heard from Asia and the Global South, within sustained ethical and political thematics of agency, representation, justice, recognition and intercultural dialogue. For Durrer and Henze in the Introduction (echoing the book’s sub-title), management practice is permeated by globalisation and internationalisation, and not delimited by fixed coordinates or form a stable object of analysis apart of the linguistic, symbolic and expresses exchanges we are always engaged in, consciously or not.
The first section — Conditions — attends to globalisation (J.P.Singh and the now unavoidable discourse of global development), linguistics and translation (Henze, drawing on data from a huge range of participants), and a particularly interesting anthropology of value, of increasing centrality to policy making as well as advocacy accross cultural sectors (Rush). The second section— Practice — opens with Maruška Svašek’s first-hand account of the evolution of the Egon Schiele Art Centrum in Český Krumlov, Czech Republic, through profound social and political transition. It moves on to Lisa Gaupp’s study on how major festival curators acts as ‘gatekeepers’ managing new moral imperatives for sociocultural diversity, and rounds off with the large-scale relation between India and the UK through cultural
diplomacy and international development (Ruhi Jhunjhunwala and Amy Walker). The third section — Education — is the largest, with four chapters on the new landscape of arts management, training and cultural education. It takes in Durrer’s critical international overview, Dragićević-Šešić and Mihaljinac’s detailed assessment of training provision in thee MENA region (specifically attending to UNESCO and the EUs cultural diplomacy efforts), and Melissa Nisbett on the cultural realities of the new global classroom facing university tutors in Western universities. H.S. Carty offers a perceptive reflective piece concluding this section — on how Western learning environments continue to be embedded in broader postcolonial unequal North-South relations.
In the final section — Future Directions — Hernández-Acosta opens by examining the policy and social contexts of arts management and cultural agency in Latin America (Puerto Rico specifically). This is followed by Shu-Shiun Ku and Jerry C.Y Liu’s critical overview of Taiwan’s evolving legal and policy innocations in the cultural realm of the past three decades. With its recent history of martial law, Tiawan has evolved with a range of attempted ‘bottom-up’ or rights-based participatory policy frameworks, here competently assessed as to their actual democratisation content. It is then left to Figueira and Fullman to complete this volume with the largest challenge of all — global climate change and the increasing facility within the nexus of cultural policy, management and international relations, to “change the system so we can become a sustainable cosomopolitan and inclusive society”.
In all, this is a substantial book. It is not quite a ‘handbook’ but as close to an ‘essential’ text we now have. While it doesn’t directly challenge the business school hegemony of ‘management’ and continued appropriation of ‘creativity’, it nonetheless sets out the paramers for a compelling new intellectual agenda for cultural workers, researchers and policymakers to think and act together.
Firstly published in German language in: Kulturpolitische Gesellschaft e.V. (ed.): Kulturpolitische Mitteilungen, No 168 (I/2020)
Reviewer: Dr Jonathan Vickery
Associate Professor
Director: MA Arts, Enterprise and Development Co-Editor in Chief: Journal of Law, Social Justice and Global Development Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies University of Warwick Millburn House
University Science Park Coventry, West Midlands, UK CV4 7AL
More Book Reviews
Find the Arts Management book review by Kristin Oswald here.
Book Review by Annika Hampel
Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe. A New Field for Museum Studies
The restitution of African objects in European museums has been widely debated after French President Macron’s important call in November 2017, based on the report on the ‘Restitution of African Cultural Heritage’ by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy. The publication ‘Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe’ does not provide solutions to the manifold issues raised in this debate, but shows a number of useful ways forward for working with contested colonial collections across the two continents.
From the Tyranny of Developmentalism to a new Paradigm for Euro-African museum partnerships
The book, edited by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer and Raphael Schwere and published 2018 at Transcript (Germany) and Fountain Publishers (Uganda), focuses on African and European museums engaging in cooperative projects and programs. Reality shows that only a few intercontinental museum collaborations “live up to the demands of postcolonial critique” (p. 4). Instead, projects often reproduce colonial dynamics and reinforce relations of dependence. The European partner in this context usually plays the role of funder, teacher/trainer (for example in conservation and restoration) and curator. The African partner is the receiver and learner. Mutual respect and equality in devising and managing shared projects can often not be detected. Rather, a co-production which creates new knowledge, including the transformation of both partners’ perspectives, practices and institutions, remains the exception in contemporary museums’ partnerships between countries of the two continents. The potential of collections “to express the multiple ways of perceiving, knowing, interpreting and co-existing on a culturally diverse planet” is missed (p. xvi).
The book brings together contributions from multi-disciplinary as well as African and European experts on Museology, Heritage Studies, Cultural Management, Postcolonial Theory and African Studies. It is based on discussions which were held at the conference ‘Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe: Opportunities, Challenges and Modalities’, hosted in 2016 by the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, where museums academics and professionals exchanged their experiences and expertise in museum collaboration between Africa and Europa. The editors Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere have additionally based their publication on the outcomes of a transcontinental project between three museums in Africa (Uganda) and Europe (Switzerland) – the Uganda National Museum in Kampala, the Igongo Cultural Centre in Mbarara, and the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. By doing so, they underline a clearly practice-oriented approach.
Structure & Content
The articles reflect on various cooperative practices implemented or used by museums. For example, they share experiences and visions on African-European museum cooperation and thus debate critical questions such as “[H]ow to address and repair histories of disconnection between artefacts and society, how to rethink the work of museum in mediating relations between objects and individuals, and how to reconsider partnerships between African and European museums”? (p. xxi).
The book is structured into four sections, each comprised of two to three chapters:
PART I. Mapping the field – the history and context of Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe
PART II. Local communities and international networks – relations of partnership?
PART III. Accessibility of collections from Africa
PART IV. Critique and evaluation of museum cooperation
To read the full review by Annika Hampel, please click here:
Further Literature
Below, we are compiling a reading list of relevant literature which will be posted here throughout the duration of the network. Specific reading suggested for each seminar is available on a separate page. Please see the drop down menu under the heading, Literature.
Anheier, H. and Isar, Y.R., 2010. Cultural Expression, Creativity and Innovation, The Cultures and Globalization Series, 3. London: SAGE Publications.
Bharucha, R., 2000. The Politics of Cultural Practice: Thinking Through Theatre in an Age of Globalization. London: Athlone Press.
Bennett, T., 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bennett, T., 2001. Differing diversities: Transversal study on the theme of cultural policy and cultural diversity. Brussels: Council of Europe.
Brockington, G. ed. 2009. Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle. Bern: Peter Lang.
Carty, H. 2014. Democraticising Cultural Institutions—A Challenge for Europe. A Challenge for Culture. In Henze, R., and Wolfram, G., Eds., Exporting Culture: Which Role for Europe in a Global World?. Springer Science & Business Media, pp. 63-76.
Caust, J., 2018. Arts Leadership in Contemporary Contexts, Abingdon: Routledge.
Caust, J., ed., 2015. Arts and Cultural Leadership in Asia, Abingdon: Routledge.
Cowan, T., 2002. Creative destruction: How Globalisation is Changing the World’s Cultures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Delanty, G., 2009. The Cosmopolitan Imagination. The Renewal of Critical Social Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DeVereaux, C., 2009. Practice versus a discourse of practice in cultural management. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 39(1), pp. 65-72.
Dewey, P. and Wyszomirski, M., 2004. International Issues in Cultural Policy and Administration: A Conceptual Framework for Higher Education” In International Conference on Cultural Policy Research, Montreal, Quebec. Available at: http://neumann. hec. ca/iccpr/PDF_Texts/Dewey_Wyszomirski.Pdf [Accessed 22 Mar 2016]
Dragićević-Šešić, M. and Dragojević, S., 2005. Arts management in turbulent times: Adaptable quality management: Navigating the arts through the winds of change. European Cultural Foundation. Available from: http://theatreforum.in/static/upload/docs/ArtsManagementBook.pdf [Accessed 6 January 2017]
Dragićević Šešić, M., and Dragojević, S., 2006. Imagined or Real Divides?. In Transcultural Europe (pp. 43-56). Palgrave Macmillan UK.
Dragićević-Šešić, M., 2008. New Learning Strategies; Peer learning as the method in the teaching cultural cooperation in Europe. In Vujanović, A. and Šuvaković, M. eds., (responsible editor)TkH 15 – SELF-EDUCATION: “GOAT TRACKS OF SELF-EDUCATION”. Belgrade: Caligraph. Available from: http://www.old.tkh-generator.net/files/casopis/TkH_br_15.pdf [Accessed 6 January 2017]
Dragićević Šešić, M. 2014. Diary from India: Meeting with Remarkable Women. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.mediantrop.rankomunitic.org/milena-dragicevic-sesic-diary-from-india-meeting-with-remarkable-women. [Accessed 5 January 2017].
Dragićević Šešić, M. and Mihaljinac, N. 2016. ‘Art Management Training and Technical Assistance Mission in the Third World: Political, Humanitarian and Cultural Diplomacy Agendas (MENA Region)’ paper presented at the International Cultural Policy Research conference, Seoul Korea, 7 July .
Gaupp, L., 2016. Die exotisierte Stadt – Kulturpolitik und Musikvermittlung im postmigrantischen Prozess. New York: Georg Olms Verlag.Open Access Download Hildesheim: Universitätsverlag: https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/bibliothek/publizieren/open-access-universitaetsverlag/verlagsprogramm/center-for-world-music-studies-in-music/band-1/ Thesis (Dr. phil.). Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media.
Gaupp, L., Stiehler, M., Zauner, K., 2016. „Wissenschaft, Forschung, Ausbildung, Fortbildung“ – Diskussionsbericht. In: Ermert, K., ed. Chormusikkultur und Migrationsgesellschaft – Erhebungen und Überlegungen zu Kinder- und Jugendchören als Orte transkultureller Teilhabe. Wolfenbüttel: Bundesakademie für Kulturelle Bildung, 179‑186.
Gaupp, L., 2015. Dekonstruktionen des „Anderen“ in Ethnologie und Soziologie – ein Plädoyer für eine postmigrantische Perspektive. Kultursoziologie, 02. 17-33.
Gaupp, L., 2012. Aspekte der Kultur- und Bildungspolitik in institutionellen transkulturellen Kontexten. In: Binas-Preisendörfer, S., Unseld, M., eds. Transkulturelle Musikvermittlung. Möglichkeiten und Herausforderungen in Forschung, Kulturpolitik und musikpädagogischer Praxis. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter Lang, 153-170.
Gaupp, L., 2012. Musik in transkulturellen Kontexten. Eine kulturpolitische Analyse der Stadt Hamburg. In: Loos, H., ed. Musik – Stadt. Traditionen und Perspektiven urbaner Musikkulturen. Leipzig: Gudrun Schröder Verlag, 148-157.
Henze, R., 2017. Introduction to International Arts Management, Berlin: Springer.
Hesmondhalgh, D. and Saha, A., 2013. Race, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production”. Popular Communication, 11(3), pp. 179-195.
Murji, K. and Solomos, J., eds., 2015. Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Negus, K., 2002. The Work of Cultural Intermediaries and the Enduring Distance Between Production and Consumption. Cultural Studies, 16(4), pp. 501-515.
Novak-Leonard, J., O’Malley, M., and Truong, E. 2015. Minding the gap: Elucidating the disconnect between arts participation metrics and arts engagement within immigrant communities. Cultural Trends, 24(2), pp. 112-121.
Paquette, J., and Redaelli, E., 2015. Arts Management and Cultural Policy Research. Springer.
Richieri Hanania, L., ed., 2014. Cultural Diversity in International Law. Routledge.
Rösler, B., 2015. The case of Asialink’s arts residency program: towards a critical cosmopolitan approach to cultural diplomacy. International Journal of Cultural Policy, 21(4), pp. 463-477.
Rowntree, J., Neal, L., and Fenton, R., 2010. International Cultural Leadership: Reflections, Competencies and Interviews, London: Cultural Leadership Programme.
Available at: http://creativeconomy.britishcouncil.org/media/uploads/files/International_Cultural_Leadership_report.pdf [Accessed: 11 February 2016]
Singh, J., 2010. International Cultural Policies and Power, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
Singh, J., 2011. Globalized arts: The entertainment economy and cultural identity, New York: Columbia University Press.
Singh, J.P., 2017. Sweet Talk: Paternalism and Collective Action in North-South Trade Relations. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Stevenson, D., Kann-Rasmussen, N., and Balling, G., 2015. Cultural participation in Europe: Shared problem or shared problematisation? International Journal of Cultural Policy, s. 1-18. DOI: 10.1080/10286632.2015.1043290
Suteu, C., 2006. Another brick in the wall: A critical review of cultural management education in Europe, Amsterdam: Boekmanstudies.
Svašek, M., 2007. The Anthropology Art and Cultural Production: Histories, Themes, Perspectives. Pluto Press.
Svašek, M., 2012. Moving subjects, moving objects: transnationalism, cultural production and emotions. Vol. 1. Berghahn Books, 2012.
Svašek, M., and Meyer, B., eds., 2016. Creativity in Transition: Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe (Vol. 6). Berghahn Books.
Tchouikina, S. 2010. The Crisis in Russian Cultural Management: Western Influences and the Formation of New Professional Identities in the 1990s–2000s. The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society, 40(1), pp. 76-91
Wolfram, G., Sandrini, M., 2016. Teachers for Life. Empowerment of refugees to teach and share knowledge. Berlin: BoP-Publishing
Henze, R., and Wolfram, G., ed., 2013. Exporting culture. Which role for Europe in a global world? Berlin: Springer Verlag
Wolfram, G., ed., 2012. Kulturmanagement und Europäische Kulturarbeit. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag
Xuereb, K., 2018. The Impact of the European Union on Cultural Policy in Malta. Croatian International Relations Review, XXIV (82), pp. 38-61.
Xuereb, K., 2017. Can nation branding be a successful tool for the practice of public diplomacy? A Maltese case study. Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 13(3), pp. 255-263.
Xuereb, K., 2011. European Cultural Policy and Migration: Why Should Cultural Policy in the European Union Address the Impact of Migration on Identity and Social Integration?International Migration, 49(2), pp. 28-53.