INTRO
LATHAM
Welcome to Artful Conversations, a podcast about arts and cultural management. I’m Annetta Latham.
INGRAM
And I'm Katrina Ingram. We interview leaders who help shape the world of arts and culture, sharing their stories, insights, and observations.
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LATHAM
Welcome to Artful Conversations, I’m your host Annetta Latham. Today, I have the pleasure of discussing cultural policy and urban regeneration with Dr. Dave O’Brien. Dave is the Chancellor's Fellow in cultural and creative industries at the University of Edinburgh College of Art. Dave did his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Liverpool, looking at the European Capital of Culture and has numerous publications in the areas of culture and creative industries. Welcome Dave.
O’BRIEN
Hello, thanks for inviting me to talk about culture and cultural policy.
LATHAM
Can you sum up your current role as the Chancellor’s Fellow to give us an understanding of this position, and how your research relates to that role?
O’BRIEN
Yeah I mean it's a pretty fun sort of grand title, Chancellor’s Fellow in cultural and creative industries at the University of Edinburgh’s College of Art. Well essentially it's a research position that transitions into being a sort of regular academic member of staff after a short period of a couple of years. So at the moment, I'm working on a bunch of different projects that are related to cultural and creative industries. One of them is a big project on inequality which is publishing some stuff, and is also running a public engagement or impact program with an organization called Barbican in central London, and also in a charity called Arts Emergency, and an arts commissioning organization called create London. Half my time is spent out at the moment as a conduit to the British Parliament, working on an inquiry about the social impact of engaging in culture and sport. And a bunch of smaller things going on there about cultural creative industries. So yeah, that's how that kind of relates to that grand title.
LATHAM
One of the other things that you've got going on, is you have a podcast called New Books in Critical Theory. Tell us a little bit about that so that.
O’BRIEN
It came out from me listening to a lot of podcasts and having conversations with Marshall Poe, who edits the overall New Books Network. He said, “do you want to host,” and I thought I might be quite interested, and that was three, maybe four years ago when that happened. It's basically an excuse for me to talk to authors about books I'm interested in reading. And yet it seems to go pretty well. It's got a reasonable audience. It means I get to read books that are looking interesting, and I think will be good for conversation.
LATHAM
Fantastic. You've got that depth of knowledge, and there isn't enough time on this show to talk about every aspect of your work, but I'd like to focus on cultural policy and regeneration, which are two major topics of importance. That also hold great personal interest to me. In relation to cultural policy, there is not one definitive answer to what culture is. In your book, Cultural Policy, you outline the interdisciplinary approach to understanding culture. Can you explain how you define culture, and why this might require an interdisciplinary approach in order to understand?
O’BRIEN
In the book, which is a couple of years old now, I talk through two different perspectives on culture. One is an artistic set of meanings, and the other is more anthropological. That kind of corresponds to a couple of key thinkers, and we can unpack this by thinking about… on one hand, we might think about culture as the ways human beings interact with each other. Everybody has culture, culture might be a way of life as the Welsh Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams would talk about it. But I guess for me to talk about culture, we think about it in terms of artifacts or products, maybe experiences. We think about paintings, films, or whatever, and that's much more bound up with the idea of culture as being art forms. Then this carries with it a set of judgments about culture being those things, which are maybe good, as opposed to other things which are marginalized and not given the kind of status of being legitimate, or high art. We might associate this with a longer lineage, maybe from Kant onwards, through a British tradition of literary criticism that talked about things in terms of, cultures is like the bass that's been thought and said in the world. So yeah, two, or I suppose many frames. There are lots of other ways you can kind of think about culture and talk about it, but I found those most useful when outlining what my book was going to talk about.
LATHAM
Okay, so how does this definition of culture relate to cultural policy?
O’BRIEN
It lays bare one of the big tensions in cultural policy, not just in the U.K., but often in a range of different countries around the world. On the one hand, cultural policy is about fostering greats or high arts, or excellence. But on the other hand, it's about bringing entire populations. You can layer this on to all the modes of cultural policy, all the functions of cultural policy, which are often to do with things like building national identity, which has a kind of inclusiveness and an excellence element within it. All the more recent stations of cultural policy have to do with things like economic impact, or social impact, like criminal justice programs or education programs. Those two ways of thinking about culture are often quite hard to reconcile. Sometimes it works in terms of excellence for everybody, which might be Government or Arts Council in the countries that have Arts Council slogans. But often what's thought about is actually assumed by particular social groups, or is only produced by specific social groups along axes of gender, ethnicity, social, and economic status, class, disability, sexuality, these kinds of demographic characteristics.
LATHAM
So, from your perspective, what are major priorities in considerations when creating a cultural policy?
O’BRIEN
I think this question really ties into that tension about how you think about cultural policies that are so open to everybody and are not exclusive. The academic Lisanne Gibson has quite a nice turn of phrase when she says that if you're going to make decisions about state funding or about what kind of culture deserves state support, then you’re making decisions that inevitably exclude or include certain social groups. You make particular kinds of culture legitimate, or not legitimate, but at the same time artists, filmmakers, musicians, they're all driven by some sense of the value of their work. Having interviewed lots of creative practitioners, none of them say they want to make bad work, or they want to produce rubbish, or they want to make things that don't have value in a variety of different ways. So, promoting excellence is really difficult in the context of making decisions that are about legitimizing some forms of culture, and maybe marginalizing or even implicitly making judgments about the worth or not of other forms of culture.
LATHAM
Yes, it sounds really interesting. Edmonton is currently going through a rewrite of our ten-year cultural plan. The EAC, the Edmonton Arts Council, is currently endeavouring to reach out to as much of the community as they can to shape the plan. The old one’s called The Art of Living, and they’re trying to shape the new one for the next ten years. It’s an interesting thing to do, to write a policy for ten years, when you talk about promoting excellence as the world moves very quickly. Technology moves very quickly. So that interesting element of who’s included in the plan, when there’s some technology that may not even exist yet that will have impact on that plan.
O’BRIEN
The other thing I should've said as well is, we've been talking in I suppose theoretical terms about culture and culture policy. There are really practical terms about, like, who's going to pay for this, where's the money come from? What kind of working conditions? How are our artists, filmmakers, etc., going to be enjoying or not in cultural production if it's funded by the market, or from the state, or funded by some combination of both, or funded by civil society, or whatever. Then how is it possible to create these models that fund things in a sustainable or long term fashion, when it might be the case that audiences will change quite rapidly because of digital technology, modes of cultural production might change quite rapidly because of technology. It might be the case that the kinds of experiences that we'd like to see inside the theatre become very costly to stage, or maybe become so cheap that it's difficult to make a living on the back end. You've identified something really important that ties back into a big question about how public policy allocates resources.
LATHAM
Which is really interesting, and I don't think we’ll touch that on this interview. But we might get back to you on that another day. In relation to that, what do you see as the role of academia in furthering the development of creating cultural policy? For example, is there a role for academic research in bridging the gaps between policymakers and creative practitioners?
O’BRIEN
That's a really great question, and it's one that the U.K. is struggling with, as the context for doing academic research becomes increasingly influenced by the idea of being public, or having impact, or having a social value. I suppose there’s three things to say. One is in terms of directly providing evidence for decisions about cultural policy, so that might be doing analysis of large social surveys, it might be doing work with culture producers, as opposed to practicalities of feeding into the policy process. Which is often driven by quite numeric, economic forms of analysis.
Second could be in the way that academic research theorizes particular issues, in ways that maybe don't directly get cultural policies to change overnight, but transform the context for cultural policy thinking. We've seen in the U.K., over ten years, a change in how the Arts Council in England thought about audiences problematically as having a deficit if they're not engaging, thinking about audiences as people who basically need to be engaged, talking unfortunately in terms of areas being cold spots for cultural provision, and this kind of language, to trying to think much more about coproduction for audiences that aren’t engaging with the sort of culture that ACE tends to fund. That's not entirely the responsibility of academics. This is stuff that's gone on in individual art forms as well, but obviously there's been a lot of academic discussion theorizing these models of what an audience is, what an engaged culture citizen might be.
The third one, which I think doesn't really get much attention, is in training and developing people who work in cultural policy, and also in the arts and cultural sector more generally. Particularly through things like arts management and cultural policy courses, a lot of the people who take those courses to seek their Master's level will go on to have policy-focused jobs, whether in organizations or in government. They're quite influenced by research and teaching. I'm a research fellow at the moment, so I'm not teaching on any specific courses, but when I did at previous institutions, lots of the people who were taking our Master’s courses would end up making decisions about cultural policy. So that's another important way the research gets disseminated, almost in a kind of long march through the institutions.
LATHAM
One of the phrases that you used was cold spots, can you explain that?
O’BRIEN
This is a really problematic term, and the Arts Council England definitely doesn't use this term anymore. It was a kind of informal idea. If you look at the northeast of England, that has much lower rates of engagement with Arts Council England-sponsored culture. But also, there are big swathes of it, for a variety of different reasons, that don't have the same levels of cultural pervasion as some of the major cities. Even somewhere like Newcastle in the north of England, which has a big hinterland, has lower levels of cultural engagement and lower levels of cultural provision for its broader hinterland when compared to Manchester or London. The term sort of makes sense when you're thinking in terms of, how do you get more people to go to things that we're funding? But it doesn't make sense when you're thinking about culture in an anthropological term, of people who have and do culture differently doesn't mean they’re missing culture, doesn't mean that it's a cultural cold spot where they live.
As I said, that kind of casual term is thankfully gone from Arts Council language. It's something they really don’t use. In trying to stay away, there’s a program called Creative People and Places in England that addresses the cold spot problem but has moved away from that language. So, that mode of thinking as well.
LATHAM
Yes, it's an interesting one, because it's certainly a phrase that has a built in assumption. It's driven around prescribed culture into rural, remote areas by very built up urban areas, who say “this is what we are prescribing as what culture is,” that kind of ticket-buying mentality. It removes, like you said, an old phrase. Which is good, because it regiments that humans do and are culture, and it's been in our lives. Why not buy a ticket for it, but getting a ring around and playing ukulele and singing with a bunch of people down at the park is culture without buying a ticket for us.
O’BRIEN
I mean cultural policy is full of these kinds of assumptions, and some of it, as you've identified, is about rural versus urban. Some of it is about different social status groups, or different levels or varieties of education. In the U.K., the classic issue is a social class, and how it intersects with things like gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, to give a particular legitimacy to specific cultural forms which get funded and get some state support.
LATHAM
What conversation is needed to guide policymaking now and in the future?
O’BRIEN
It's a good question. I think that on the one hand, that's the kind of radical moment of thinking about how particular canons in literature, theater, or in film and music, are being critiqued for the sorts of inequalities that are embedded within them and then replicated. Having conversations around what should we be keeping, what should we be changing. Who is excluded both from consuming and producing around those cannons is one thing that needs to happen. That can be done in kind of an open and hopefully participatory way.
Then there's the question about money. One thing that's come up a little bit in the north of England has been discussions about participatory budgeting, and how individuals and communities might take control of their own budgets to fund things that they think are important, culturally speaking. This presents radical challenges for organizations, to feel like a community owns them and it's for them. But then, more broadly beyond the inequality questions, there is a set of issues about how cultural policy can step back when it isn't needed, and if it's possible for cultural policy to be not needed in ways that aren't about legitimacy, or linking particular activities to being civilized or legitimate or whatever. So the way markets do good things, they provide really great bits of culture you know like I'm a big Star Wars geek. There's an interesting relationship between the actors, bits of production, arts education, and then the production of billion dollar Hollywood enterprises. Some of which, actually, was filmed in the U.K. I'm thinking more about relationships to markets, and maybe the things that markets are good at. It isn't an area for cultural policy particularly to grapple.
LATHAM
That’s great. Let's move on to talk about urban regeneration. It has a number of titles, its urban regeneration, in Canada we talk about it as creative cities, which is all about urban regeneration as well. You've written extensively on urban regeneration. So let’s take this moment to define this to our audiences. What exactly is regeneration, and why is it important and currently talked about so much?
O’BRIEN
That again is a really good question, and it's a very loaded question I think. In some policy-led discourses, urban regeneration is just about transforming particular places that have particular social problems, like employment, or issues with low land values, issues about poor-quality housing, or crime. In more critical academic takes on it, urban regeneration gets linked to much more problematic policy interventions, often much to do with gentrification, which is about moving different social groups out of places so other social groups can move into them, rent values or land values or property prices can go up. Some people can make effectively lots of money in urban areas. So the term itself is quite loaded, and needs to be used with caution, particularly when culture is involved. Cultural policy, I think, now is a sort of well-established conversation, and often discussions about cultural policy come in ways that take it for granted, or read that we're talking about urban regeneration policy when we talk about cultural policy. But as I said, it's a very politicized and loaded term.
LATHAM
So, what is the role then of cultural policy in influencing urban regeneration?
O’BRIEN
It's a good question. There are lots of different narratives, and lots of different ways of understanding that relationship, and lots of different histories. One, and it is only one amongst many, is the way that the rise of urban regeneration discourses in the U.K., particularly in the early and mid 1980s, seemed to go in certain places hand in hand with the use of culture, whether it was hoping for a particular artistic milieu to grow and attract people, or whether it was having cultural festivals, or cultural events, building cultural institutions, and hoping that investment, a higher tax base, etc. will come in. I mean, already, talking about regeneration going hand in hand with cultural policy, and talking about things like the urban tax base, or property values, or whatever, you can see how this will be contested, and how this will be highly politicized, and in some places, a very volatile thing. Particularly bearing in mind the idea about everybody having culture, and culture being this thing that humans do by interacting. That idea in the context of, can property developers make money, or can we get a sustainable type of employment on the back of this, can be highly controversial.
LATHAM
In the work you've done, to make this more concrete for our listeners, can you share an example of a cultural-led regeneration project you’ve seen?
O’BRIEN
Yeah, sure, Liverpool is where I'm from, it's where I grew up, that's where I did my Ph.D. My Ph.D. was about culture policy and urban regeneration in the city. In 2008, they had a yearlong cultural festival, which is this thing called European Capital of Culture, which goes to two European cities every year. That was used, I suppose, hand in hand with physical infrastructure development, and various other bits of kind of inward investment, attracting policies to rebrand the city as a tourist destination. Mirko what's that. But it's important to see 2008 in the context of a decade of urban policy, in terms of planning, in terms of European funding, which is really important. The British government, certainly through the 1980s, was disinterested in many ways in Liverpool, and its post-industrial or shall I say post-commercial employment crisis. The government did try various interventions, one of which was cultural, actually, a garden festival to try and rebrand the city. There were various bits of urban regeneration around a new gallery in a dark area. 2008 was something that brought all of the various strands of policy together, and kind of gave a focus to lots of the different bits of cultural identity, and regeneration that's been going on in the city. It was very successful, I was part of an evaluation team, I was talking more at management, but an evaluation team did some work looking at the economic impact, social impact, engagement, both in terms of tourism and business, but also in terms of the local population. Both myself and other authors have argued there were specific, bounded, local reasons. The idea of transferring it as a model is something we should be really cautious of.
LATHAM
Which leads into our next question really well, there’s some discussion around the efficiency around leading cultural regeneration, governments in particular because they are funding bodies, demanding to see measurements and impacts. In the article, The Social Life of Measurement, you mention how short term data does not measure not major long term outcomes. Can you explain a better way that we can think about how we measure the progress of this type of work?
O’BRIEN
Yeah, I mean, it's worth unpacking several things. The first is a sort of standard response to any question about how you do impact evaluation, which is that you have to start really almost before the project is thought about, and you have to carry on well after the project finishes. That's something that tends not to happen at all, really, with arts and cultural projects. They tend to be evaluated after they finish, with a post-hoc set of justifications or a set of questions asked. That’s the standard evaluator’s comment. As well, there's the question of what these cultural interventions seek to do, and is it possible to measure them at all. Often the kind of proxy data that's taken as impact is really evidence saying maybe something else, or isn't appropriate for evidencing the claims of cultural organizations.
Then there's the question about causality. Whilst there are big debates in the social sciences about how you can do any sort of causal claims for particular interventions, I think cultural regeneration interventions are principally problematic in this case, because they're not random control trials as we would do with a medical trial or something. It tends to be a major long term policy intervention with little or nothing to compare to. There were some synthetic comparisons you could do, economic geographers try and do this sort of thing. But there is a a broader question about how do you attribute causality based on the kinds of data you're likely to be able to collect. Often even when you try and do that, it's only something that gets talked about at the end, rather than as a built-in process for an entire project.
LATHAM
Yeah, so in Canada we use the same kind of regeneration model, but it's called Creative Cities and that's about something some of our organizations doing things in vacant spaces, and activating those. But we also have a lot of our arts organizations looking at community engagement as a role of urban regeneration as well in the Creative Cities model. All these people have to do measurement as well. We talk about measurements that are very high-level. I'm curious to know how this way of thinking about measurement might relate to arts organizations in a general sense, and how they could apply a measurement of cultural engagement and urban regeneration to what they do in their programming.
O’BRIEN
Yeah. In some ways, it's really a bit mean to expect people who are highly skilled as community artists, or socially-engaged filmmakers, or something like that, to then know how to be social scientists, who can do concrete, robust, well-developed evaluations. Actually, we should think about not getting deliverers to measure, and to cost projects that have a separate bit of evaluation built in, so we can bring people with that kind of expertise. The more practical side of things is the sense of just being attentive to things, like who is the audience, who is turning up, in some ways the rise of metrics or evaluation thinking has been very controversial. People have resisted it quite heavily, but at the same time it does make people, I think, attentive to questions of “who is my audience, who is turning up?” “Is it okay if I'm claiming to be a community filmmaker, if I'm just speaking to people who live on the periphery of an area, or one particular articulate, well-resourced social group, rather than another social group who may be quite disinterested or feel my presence there is just as a tourist, or as someone who's treating my area as a goldfish bowl to be looked at?”
So, the kind of attentiveness, I think, that comes from thinking about evaluations, keeping records, thinking about who is turning up, that can be quite quite useful. Well the thing I was going to say, technology can be quite useful here as well. We've seen, particularly with the rise of specific kinds of analytics. Especially things like box office data, if it is collected well. The possibility of not automating questions about impact, because obviously audiences and impact are two very different things, but thinking creatively about the kinds of engagement offered by technology can be really useful in this context.
LATHAM
Cultural vitality is another term that is used in reference to the work of urban regeneration. Can you explain what this means, and why we might want to pay attention to this?
O’BRIEN
I'll be honest, I'm not sure I can. Maybe we should have discussed this before we started. I guess it's something like, if I go back to where I started, that question of the anthropological definition of culture, places always have culture. People always have culture. I think there is tension in the language, cultural vitality is kind of saying “well, maybe what's going on isn't the right kind of culture.” It can be useful sometimes to resist, say just the building of very expensive military flats, or luxury condos which have no people living in them, to replace an area that used to be a home for creative workers, or something like that.
LATHAM
If you could go back to what we were talking about before, that assumption of the culture from the outside looking in, making the assumption of cultural vitality of the area or a district is done at a distance with assumptions built into it.
O’BRIEN
Yeah, absolutely. Equally as the more pernicious or problematic elements of regeneration sliding into gentrifying programs, you can see the kinds of things that are associated with an area having this specific cultural vitality giving way to just being a brand or an advertising slogan, just being a “reason to invest” or something like that.
LATHAM
Do you see, before someone starts in community outreach, or cultural urban regeneration, whatever the tag they want to call it, Creative Cities, whatever it is, do you see a value in doing a cultural mapping prior to doing that kind of activity?
O’BRIEN
Absolutely. It's important to know what you might lose from any intervention, the interventions are carried out with the sense of, “we're doing something, so it must be good.” It's very rare in public policy where you get a voice that says “actually, maybe doing nothing is the right thing to do.” So cultural mapping as part of an evaluation, or part of a policy appraisal process, I think is really important. It's also when we come down to maybe the medium-sized organization level, it's also a mode of engagement as well. I think often organizations can lapse into talking about the community, or a community where they're based, without having proper interactions or relationships with the community. Typically, if they're delivering a particular kind of cultural offer which maybe is only predominantly of interest to one social group over another. The kind of activities you associate with cultural mapping, the sort of social science that comes with it, can be useful for organizations as well as policy.
LATHAM
Yeah. So how can policy resolve the obvious gaps that persist today in terms of work with the urban regeneration landscape?
O’BRIEN
I'm not totally sure of it can, and partly because the tension between making money and supporting particular kinds of cultural activities. For some cultural activities, making money is built in, and it works. You know, supply and demand, property developments, and inflation of property prices that is associated with if not less successful, the less interesting, perhaps less democratically-controlled urban regeneration. That tension means that all you have is a brand or a slogan that remains of cultural activity, plastered onto faceless architecture for long term or unfortunately short term property investment. Public policy faces real difficulties here, and particularly in the context where often there isn't that much public money around. I know certainly in the U.K., there are big issues for the cultural sector at local level as local authorities are forced to reduce funding. The obvious thing to say in response to all that is, policy is a manifestation or a response to democratic demands. One thing public policy should be able to do is be representative of different communities, maybe trying to bring it into dialogue or almost resolve some of these tensions. So that would be the kind of thing. I'm not talking really about consultations, which obviously are often skewed in favour of developers, and in favour of moneymaking, or whatever, I'm thinking more in terms of the ability to arrange a dialogue between different social groups, and hopefully produce planning documents. A cultural plan for a city. Or, make practical demands on those social groups who stand to gain in financial terms from a regeneration project, that they involve others, give something back, make that development sustainable.
LATHAM
Yeah, so one of the things that concerns me with the urban regeneration model, is it seems to be becoming a fix-all to a social problem. So if you have a neighbourhood that has a high rate of drug use, teenage pregnancy, even if it's in a rural community, as well, the model of cultural regeneration is being seen as a fix-all. Are you seeing that at all in what you're looking into?
O’BRIEN
It’s tricky, because there is a certain temptation that comes with cultural interventions, that if they carry with them the baggage of culture being the best, that's been thought and said in the world, the idea of culture being transformative, or civilizing, or particular cultural work is helping to get epiphanies for getting involved in delivering cultural or creative activity. That means that the temptation is there to say, “well of course, culture can solve crime, or transform kids’ lives,” and often, unfortunately, cultural organizations will adopt the language, “but we know this is true, we've seen it,” often individual culture practitioners will say “well, that's why I'm doing this, it's what got me into this,” usually as a teenager, that kind of stuff. At the same time, obviously policy sees this as a quick fix. Solving of crime is hugely difficult.
Solving social isolation in rural areas often requires lots of money, building of infrastructure, and it might require a wholesale transformation of the history of a nation's form of social organization. So, the offer of “well, we should just do some contemporary dance classes,” can be quite seductive. There is, to go back to what we were discussing earlier, the need to almost rethink the limits of culture. And to be comfortable with the idea of saying, “there are certain things culture probably can't do. We don't have enough evidence that it can do it.” We want to be cautious about entirely projecting that kind of demand down onto the shoulders of cultural organizations. But there is almost forgotten or often overlooked elements of cultural organizations, for very understandable reasons, being keen to over-claim or to get involved in the possibility of over-delivering because of their investment in the power of culture.
LATHAM
That’s great, thank you. Is there anything that we've not covered today you wish to add to our conversation before we wrap up?
O’BRIEN
That felt pretty comprehensive. There's loads more I can say, and as with all these things and there are sometimes similar things with complete different perspectives. I encourage people to read around, there's lots of good stuff out there.
LATHAM
Thank you for your time. I really appreciate it.
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INGRAM
It's Katrina and Annetta in the studio. My mind is blown by that interview with Dave O'Brien, that was absolutely incredible. One of the big things that struck me was his perspective on culture, and this idea that culture might be the way humans interact with each other at one level, but on another level we see it as the artifacts, the products, the film, the painting. And this idea of culture being bound by some kind of an art form that has this value judgment on it. That can lead to things being either marginalized, or not legitimized, and other things being seen as high art. One of the examples that really came to mind for me is the idea of graffiti, which started out on the streets, and now is in galleries and is seen as high art. It's kind of gone through that full cycle. It's quite fascinating.
LATHAM
Yeah absolutely. I think one of the really interesting things that came out in his talk from that as well, was cultural policy, and the fact that we create cultural policy, and in the mere creating of it we’re creating inclusion and exclusion. Because the idea of a cultural policy is to promote excellence in the arts. And like he said, you know, artists, filmmakers, musicians, they want to create the best that they can, but because we have to create a policy to promote the art, in the very nature of that policy, we're including and excluding. I had never thought about it like that actually.
INGRAM
I hadn't either. It's something that seems really benign, policy. Another thing that seems benign is doing evaluations, and yet there's this idea that how we evaluate things and how we evaluate cultural interventions in particular might have all kinds of implications. I know that's an area that you're really fascinated by.
LATHAM
Very much so. The cultural regeneration model is fascinating, and it's a growing model. It's used right throughout the UK. It's growing into Canada, and growing into Australia and New Zealand. I think what's really interesting about that model, and evaluations, is are we actually having a cause and effect change, is culture really doing that? One of the things that Dave talked about was the fact that in evaluation, we tend to do it straight after the gig. You walk out of a festival, and someone's going “can you answer this questionnaire?” And what he's saying is that's one way of doing it, but we actually in culture need to be doing legacy projects, and doing legacy evaluations. So yeah, cultural regeneration is one of my passions, and it's about “is it really affecting change?” And we'll see, as we move on, how that works.
INGRAM
Absolutely fascinating, and the fact that we're not living in a lab, we're living in real life.
LATHAM
Yeah. Always interesting.
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This show was created by:
Executive Producer - Annetta Latham
Producer - Katrina Ingram
Technical Producer - Paul Johnston
Research Assistant - Rael Lockwood
Theme Music - Emily Darfur
Cover Art - Constanza Pacher
Latham, A. (Executive Producer). Latham, A (Host). (2018, April 18). Artful Conversations [Season 1: Episode 3]. Dr. Dave O’Brien. Podcast retrieved from https://www.artfulconversations.com/transcriptions/2019/1/4/ep-3-dave-obrien
Artful Conversations is a production of Annetta Latham in partnership with MacEwan University. All rights reserved.