Artistic Production and (Re)production: Youth Arts Programmes as Enablers of Common Cultural Dispositions

Abstract

Whilst the position of young people as arts consumers has been highly critiqued, the opportunities for young people to be celebrated as entrepreneurial and subcultural arts producers are often overlooked. This article explores the role of young people as agents of creation through arts programmes and the development of ‘common cultural dispositions.’ The framework – Artistic Production and (re)production – draws on and combines analytical insights and theoretical concepts from Paul Willis and Pierre Bourdieu in order to argue that young people both consume and produce artistic practices, which then leads to a reproduced social hierarchy. This combination gives additional insight into culturally reproductive cycles, which remain problematically entrenched with social class disadvantage. An ethnographic methodology is reported, which enabled an in-depth exploration of everyday creativity, self-efficacy, self-identity, and forms of resistance for the young people in this study. However, I argue that whilst Artistic Production offers hopes of transformation, in particular for working-class and marginalised groups, ‘positional suffering’ and unconscious mechanisms of reproduction were also apparent.