Cultures Of Participation

This book examines cultural participation from three different, but interrelated perspectives: participatory art and aesthetics; participatory digital media, and participatory cultural policies and institutions. Focusing on how ideals and practices relating to cultural participation express and (re)produce different "cultures of participation", an interdisciplinary team of authors demonstrate how the areas of arts, digital media, and cultural policy and institutions are shaped by different but interrelated contextual backgrounds. Chapters offer a variety of perspectives and strategies for empirically identifying "cultures of participation" and their current transformations and tensions in various regional and national settings. This book will be of interest to academics and cultural leaders in the areas of museum studies, media and communications, arts, arts education, cultural studies, curatorial studies and digital studies. It will also be relevant for cultural workers, artists and policy makers interested in the participatory agenda in art, digital media and cultural institutions.

Media Studies.

This book examines cultural participation from three different, but interrelated perspectives: participatory art and aesthetics; participatory digital media, and participatory cultural policies and institutions. The book will be of interest to academics in the areas of museum studies, media and communications, and cultural studies.

The underlying question of this collection of essays focuses on the very core of our democratic culture. It asks how one can actively take part in its political, legal, educational, informational, social, cultural and economic mechanisms. Advanced technologies have given rise to a vast array of tools enabling a culture of participation. New forms of civic engagement have emerged, as well as a new conceptualization of active citizenship. These developments encouraged the authors of this collection to address legal, social, political, philosophical, and media aspects of the emancipatory potential of participatory democracy. They focus on specific case studies stretching across various places and spheres, from the Canadian media legislature, community organizing in low-income neighbourhoods of the USA, the Knesset of Israel, the Roma minority in Poland, and legal texts of Austria, to the online sphere of art and digital democracy. The key advantage of this book thus lies in its multifaceted consideration of seemingly disparate, yet highly intertwined and ubiquitous, concepts of democratic societies around the globe.

The computer and particularly the Internet have been represented as enabling technologies, turning consumers into users and users into producers. The unfolding online cultural production by users has been framed enthusiastically as participatory culture. But while many studies of user activities and the use of the Internet tend to romanticize emerging media practices, this book steps beyond the usual framework and analyzes user participation in the context of accompanying popular and scholarly discourse, as well as the material aspects of design, and their relation to the practices of design and appropriation.

Many scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers in the cultural sector argue that Canadian cultural policy is at a crossroads: that the environment for cultural policy-making has evolved substantially and that traditional rationales for state intervention no longer apply. The concept of cultural citizenship is a relative newcomer to the cultural policy landscape, and offers a potentially compelling alternative rationale for government intervention in the cultural sector. Likewise, the articulation and use of cultural indicators and of governance concepts are also new arrivals, emerging as potentially powerful tools for policy and program development. Accounting for Culture is a unique collection of essays from leading Canadian and international scholars that critically examines cultural citizenship, cultural indicators, and governance in the context of evolving cultural practices and cultural policy-making. It will be of great interest to scholars of cultural policy, communications, cultural studies, and public administration alike.

This book develops the first integrated, critical-historical examination of the terms, narratives and assumptions constructing present day notions of participation and value, and the relations between them. Histories of Cultural Participation, Values and Governance proposes a radical re-evaluation of these relationships, organized in two inter-related sections, on political discourses of participation and value, and on culture and governance. The essays collected here provide an in-depth historical understanding of the development of definitions, assumptions and beliefs around the nature and value of cultural participation, their place in contemporary cultural governance and exploitation in local socio-economic development strategies. They also bring a novel perspective to current policy, practice and scholarly debates on the connections between culture, place-making and the creative economy. As such, the essays provide vital historical insight that sheds light on contemporary issues of cultural participation, value and governance.

This book examines the civil-social interactions which have shaped and continue to influence the political and social development of modern Gulf societies. It analyses the influence of public and private social spaces, such as sports arenas and dawawin as well as developments in the legal and cultural spheres. Geographically, the volume covers Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Each chapter discusses a different aspect of current trends in society, offering a multidimensional perspective on recent developments. In so doing, the chapters highlight the existence of a growing participation culture as a force for dynamic social change in a global context. Bringing to attention the continuing social change in public and private spaces, which have increased public social interactions within the last ten years, this books also demonstrates the opening of dialogues between the public and the authorities. The contributors are established scholars living in the Gulf, as well as academics with long-term field research in the region, thus providing unique perspectives on current sociopolitical trends in the Gulf states. Participation Culture in the Gulf will be useful to students and scholars of Middle Eastern politics and society, as well as social movements and political participation more generally.