Cultural participation: Stories of success, histories of failure

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Data suggests that the number of those labeled as cultural participants across Europe is falling. This is despite a cultural policy focus, at national and EU level, on increasing rates of participation. Traditionally research has examined the levers and barriers to participation from an approach that assumes it is the participant who has a cultural deficit. More recent research, such as the Understanding Everyday Participation Project (UEP), has challenged this by examining the nature of activities that are sanctioned as cultural participation. This redirects the focus to understand the value of those that are not. But both Stevenson (2016) and Jancovich (2014) have argued that the participation agenda has taken a performative turn that sees research used to legitimise rather than challenge the status quo. This research, therefore, seeks to disrupt the policymaking process. It focuses on cultural participation policies and projects through the lens of the stories that are told about them. It examines how the dominant narratives of such stories may contribute towards the calcification of cultural policy. In doing so the research will investigate why, despite an apparent failure to deliver any significant change in the patterns of participation, cultural policymakers appear wedded to the same methods, strategies and arguments about why observable patterns of cultural participation differ and how such differences should be reduced and removed. In short, the research seeks to address the question of why cultural policy appears so difficult to change, in spite of the weight of evidence indicating the necessity of such change. This research is founded on theories about the value of recognising and understanding failure. It posits that narratives of failure are largely overlooked in the dominant narratives about cultural participation policies and projects. It is argued that this absence reduces the capacity for learning and change. It further limits the impact that the evidence, generated by projects such as UEP, is able to have. By moving beyond the tendency to make the 'case for culture', which is prevalent both in academic and policy documents, this research will provide space for alternative voices and stories to be heard. In so doing the study will seek to disrupt the taken for granted assumptions upon which existing policy processes and practices are sustained and reproduced. It will present alternative stories of failure, with the intention to encourage new routes for future policy intervention intended to support cultural participation.Working in stages, this research will begin participatory workshops and textual analysis in order to identify the most common stories that are told about cultural participation projects. It will map the dominant narrative structures upon which they rely. In stage 2 the research will progress to in-depth qualitative interviews and online data collection. This stage will explore the fidelity of the dominant narratives about the history of cultural participation policies and projects. Stage 3 of the research will see groups of artists, arts managers and policy makers brought together in workshops to discuss the alternative stories of cultural participation projects that the research project has identified. On the basis of the findings of Stage 1 & 2 an artistic output will be produced that will provide the central stimulus for this final stage. It will highlight the contrast between the dominant narratives and those that remain hidden. These workshops will explore reasons why such alternative stories remain silenced while others become the evidence that is used to maintain the status quo. The workshops will then identify concrete actions that could be taken in order to disrupt the existing policy processes.A creative output, industry report and academic text will be created to facilitate discussion of failure beyond the life of the project with different stakeholders