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PES2020-Prosj.etabl.støtte H2020

UNCHARTED: Understanding, Capturing and Fostering the Societal Value of Culture

Awarded: NOK 59,999

With the growing emphasis on the creative economy, culture has tended to be increasingly seen in political circles under the exclusive lens of the economy and its contribution to it. Cultural policy has also been led to adopt this perspective. It has proved unable to oppose an alternative vision and generate other evaluation systems that could be opposed, in the political arena or in public discourse, to the persuasive evidence of monetary measures. Time and again, purely theoretical approaches to the value of culture, which have been largely dominant until very recently, especially in the disciplinary perspective of economics, have led to avoid the specific complexity of the value of culture and prevent its effective consideration. To counteract this tendency, it is necessary to define the social values associated with culture on a different basis from the traditional one: that of practice. Pragmatist approaches to value, elaborated from the analysis of the valuation practices of social actors, have been developed above all by economic sociology, the sociology of evaluation and management studies. From an interdisciplinary perspective that integrates historical, economic, sociological and humanistic points of view, this is the approach that fundamentally inspires this project. Works that adopt a perspective of this type in the cultural field have proliferated lately, as much in the field of the sociology of culture and the arts as, still more recently, in the one of cultural economics. But these studies have been, in general, fragmentary and have hardly incorporated the perspective of public policies. The project proposed here overcomes both limitations. In this sense, it constitutes the first all-encompassing investigation of the subject and, in addition, the only one that aims at the development of tools and systematic guidelines for the reorientation of cultural policy in a consequently pluralistic sense.

Funding scheme:

PES2020-Prosj.etabl.støtte H2020