Commoning Cultural Value: Building Hope and Resistance in Neoliberal Times – Online Book Launch

You are warmly invited to the book launch of Commoning Cultural Value: Building Hope and Resistance in Neoliberal Times . This book formalizes a commons-oriented framework for the formation of cultural value as a way to oppose current neoliberal understandings of the value of culture. In doing so, it analyses the impact of two economic theories on culture: on the one hand, the book assesses how neoliberalism has changed our understanding of culture; on the other, it explains how the concept of the commons provides a way to resist this narrative, and how its emergence in the cultural sphere responds to the need of such an alternative.This book provides an argument for a more imaginative, radical and fair approach to culture and cultural policy. Indeed, the book represents a first book-length examination of the concept of the commons in relation to cultural policy, especially for the purpose of creating a novel theoretical framework. Such an approach is based on a relational understanding of culture which finds its value as a collective process, rather than an individual product. This framework is not meant to reinforce the idea of culture as a universal panacea for the shortcomings of both the marketing and the state; quite the opposite, it looks to illuminate how culture can be the ideal site for prefigurative politics, to experiment with new political imaginations and to provide hope in neoliberal times. It appeals to practitioners and policymakers, while remaining a work of original and rigorous scholarship.
The author, Alice Borchi, will be in conversation with Prof Eleonora Belfiore (Coventry University) and Francesca Sabatini (Institute of International Sociology of Gorizia).

Please sign up to secure your place. You will receive the Microsoft Teams link 24 hours before the event.

Alice Borchi 

Alice Borchi is a Lecturer in Creative Industries at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries. Her research interests include the study of the cultural commons and cultural value, with a focus on participatory practices and shared governance in cultural policy and management. She is also interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the safeguard of the commons that bring together environmental and cultural perspectives. A list of her publications can be found here.

Eleonora Belfiore 

Eleonora (or Ele) Belfiore is the Research Culture & Connections Lead in the Arts and Creative Cultures Research Centre at Coventry University. She has published extensively on cultural politics and policy, cultural value, and particularly the place that notions of the ‘social impacts’ of the arts have had in British cultural policy discourses. For Palgrave, she edits the book series New Directions in Cultural Policy Research, which has published 16 volumes to date, and she is Co-Editor in Chief journal Cultural Trends. Ele is currently researching the labour conditions of socially engaged arts practice from an ethics of care perspective, and the role of the creative industries for development in Ghana. Ele is committed to the promotion of equality, diversity and inclusion in Higher Education, and she is one of the founding members of the Women in Academia Support Network, a trans-inclusive and intersectional charity that brings together over 12,500 women and non-binary members from across the world to support one another and pushes for gender parity and more equitable working conditions in Higher Education.

Francesca Sabatini

Francesca Sabatini, PhD, is a researcher and project manager at the Institute of International Sociology of Gorizia, where she focuses on societal resilience and the just transition, project manager for Melting Pro (Rome), a SME working on cultural policy and cultural democracy, and a strategic consultant on housing justice and territorial governance at AreaProxima (Bologna). She is adjunct professor in Management of Cultural Events (LUMSA University, Rome) and in Impact and Accounting (IULM University, Rome). After her PhD in architecture, she has been a researcher at the University of Bologna – Department of Architecture.

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