This year’s Cultural Trends one day conference is themed around: ‘Centre/Periphery: Devolution/Federalism – New Trends in Cultural Policy’, and takes place at City University in London on Friday 16th October. Impacts 08 friends Steven Miles and David O’Brien will be presenting on ‘Cultural policy as rhetoric and reality: a comparative analysis of policy-making in the peripheral north’. If you’re interested in attending (it’s free!), there are further details here, and you can contact shelley.allen@tandf.co.uk. Availability is on a first come, first served basis.
As promised, our newly restructured website is now live. It doesn’t look radically different (that’s institutional house styles for you), but hopefully you’ll find it easier to locate and digest information, and check out what we’re up to. And if you’re really curious, there are some smiling pictures of the Impacts 08 team too.
Arts Council England has just published the findings from the first three years of its Taking Part survey – and the north west is the only region which has bucked fairly static national trends. Unsurprisingly, report authors Anni Oskala and Catherine Bunting put our substantial increases in both arts attendance and participation between 2006/7 and 2007/08 at least in part down to the Liverpool Capital of Culture year.
You can find out more and download the report from the Northwest Culture Observatory.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been busy making changes to our main website. You won’t be able to see any of them until we go live (hopefully in a week or so) I’m afraid, but the idea is to make all our reports, and information about our seminars, events and special projects, much easier to find – and a bit nicer to read. We’ll be looking forward to hearing what you think too. For now though, it’s back to the metadata…
We’re holding a research seminar – Rhetoric and reality: The role of cultural policy in place and space – on 16th September to discuss findings emerging from our AHRC / ESRC Impact Fellowship in Cultural Policy and Regeneration. Attendance is very limited and therefore by invitation only.
The main objective of the Fellowship has been to advance the case for the development of a more ‘culturally sensitive’ cultural policy that can be informed by appropriate impact research methodologies. The ambition of this seminar is to begin a process in which academics, policymakers and stakeholders can develop a dialogue around notions of ‘cultural value’ founded in place. We’re aiming to highlight the contrast between rhetorical and actual notions of culture-led regeneration, using emerging data as a means of beginning to chart a way forward for a more reflexive cultural policy.
For further information check out our main site. We’ll also be adding updates here as we get closer.
When I heard that the fabulous Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, seventy in November, had just signed up to Twitter, I felt my last resistance crumbling. So at Impacts 08 we’ve finally given in and started some fledgling tweeting of our own. But now we need some friends. Please follow us at http://twitter.com/Impacts08.
