CULTURELINK – The Centre for Research in Cultural Policy, Development and Cooperation is inviting you to the second lecture within the Culturelink Guest Lecture Series, which will be held on Tuesday, December 3, 2024, at 4 p.m. in the library of the Institute for Development and International Relations. Renowned Croatian sociologists Inga Tomić-Koludrović and Mirko Petrić, will hold a lecture entitled ‘Cultural Participation and Social Inequalities in Europe’.
In their talk, the lecturers will try to provide a possible answer to an important cultural policy question posed by Belfiore (2021): Is it really about evidence? They also reflect on the usefulness of empirical methodologies borrowed from the social sciences in cultural programming and arts impact assessment (Belfiore and Bennett, 2010). Based on the insights from a large-scale empirical study of cultural participation in Europe, their answers to both questions are emphatically positive.
While they acknowledge the need to move ‘beyond the toolkit approach’ and reject a neoliberal version of ‘evidence-based policies,’ the lecturers argue that contemporary social inequalities are so multifarious and complex that they require empirical sociological research to be efficiently addressed by cultural policy.
The lecturers’ approach finds inspiration in Bourdieu’s placing social relevance as a critical goal of policy research. Their talk illustrates the potential usefulness of such an approach by discussing the effects of socio-digital inequalities on cultural participation in nine very diverse European countries (Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, and Switzerland). The lecturers plead for ‘putting the evidence back into evidence-based policy’ (Cummins, 2011).
*The data the talk is based on stems from the Horizon 2020 INVENT project, funded by the European Union under grant agreement no. 870691.
We kindly ask you to register by 2nd December by e-mail to: kultura@irmo.hr. The lecture will be held in Croatian.