Sustainable Cultural Futures: COVID-19 and Resetting Cultural Policy

This interdisciplinary project will be thematically structured around 3 issues: the values of culture; cultural work; and digitalised cultural consumption. It will focus on performing arts (e.g., theatre) and museums, two sectors that have been significantly affected by the pandemic and are under intense pressure to actively embrace the virtual. First, we will re-map the meanings and benefits of culture in the context of the pandemic via a systematic literature review and large-scale online surveys. From this, we will identify and describe the new, emerging social consensus regarding the values of culture and the purposes of cultural policy. Second, we will examine the functions of key institutions that affect the nature of cultural work (artists' unions, public funding, contracts, industry practices and relevant labour policy) and identify potential changes that would allow them to more effectively address the precarity of cultural work in the context of the continued impact of the pandemic. Third, via case studies of select performing arts organisations and museums, we will investigate how these entities reconcile their traditional beliefs in materiality and 'live' with the pressures to go digital in production and audience engagement. Cross-national online surveys will give us a bigger picture of whether and how the online delivery of digitalised cultural content can bring larger and more diverse audiences to culture. Across these three project themes, we will employ a mixed methodology, combining a systematic literature review, surveys, discussion panels, interviews and case studies. Many of our research events will be held online across the UK and Japan with simultaneous interpretation.

Despite their differences in social structures and public attitudes toward culture, both Japan and the UK have continuously struggled to justify state subsidy for culture, and their funding systems were not directly connected with individual artists and cultural workers prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Cultural policymakers in both countries have also shown concern about the uneven level of public cultural participation and are keen to know whether and how this will change with the rise of digitalised cultural consumption. By pulling together the interdisciplinary expertise of the research team and involving stakeholders from the cultural sectors of the two countries, this research will help policymakers freshly engage with the core issues of cultural policy through cross-national conversation, learning and problem-solving. The Agency of Cultural Affairs (Japan), Mori Art Museum, Ohara Museum of Art, Arts Council England and Equity have agreed to be our project partners, and there will be additional partners from both countries. We will actively engage with cultural practitioners and with experts in artist labour, labour policy and law, contracts, copyright and digital technologies to explore specific policy measures to tackle the continued impact of the pandemic as well as unpredictable future risks.

After the project ends, the UK-Japan project team will publish 2 co-edited books (1 in English, 1 in Japanese) and minimum 4 journal articles (2 in English/open access, 2 in Japanese) to widely disseminate the project findings in Japan and the UK and to international researchers and policymakers.