Abstract
In the broader context of research into cultural labour, this article focuses analytical attention on working conditions within socially engaged arts practice, which have been under-researched to date. In particular, the article aims to uncover the unacknowledged costs shouldered by socially engaged practitioners working on publicly subsidised participatory projects. On the basis of the analysis of qualitative interviews with socially engaged artists and creative professionals, the article calls for an explicit effort to bring our public cultural institutions to task in relation to what Mark Banks calls ‘creative justice’. This entails highlighting the mechanisms of systemic exploitation of artists within current funding practices and the ways in which project-based funding rarely incorporates, as a matter of course, provisions to ensure the fulfilment of duties of care towards both artists and participating communities. The article draws on feminist ethics of care to advance a first intervention towards developing fresh thinking on the moral economy of the subsidised arts sector; it does this by starting from an acknowledgement that the normative environments of contemporary arts funding point to a clear moral failure of cultural policy.
Highlights
The past 50 years have witnessed a remarkable growth in prominence of what is commonly referred to as socially engaged arts practice – participatory in nature and with a clear intention to act as intervention in the social and political sphere
In The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global, Virginia Held (2006: 10) observes that ‘the central focus of the ethics of care is on the compelling moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility’
The analysis presented in this article, points to one clear conclusion: the pressing need for a push towards an emphasis on normative perspectives in cultural policy research which focuses on the ethics of its mechanisms and practices
Summary
The past 50 years have witnessed a remarkable growth in prominence of what is commonly referred to as socially engaged arts practice – participatory in nature and with a clear intention to act as intervention in the social and political sphere. The article’s section sets out the challenges of caring for project participants as revealed by a thematic analysis of the respondents’ experiences; the part that follows argues that feminist ethics of care theories can (1) provide an effective interpretive lens to make sense of the interviewees’ motivations in their commitment to fulfilling responsibilities of care towards their project participants, (2) point to a normative approach to addressing the shortcoming of the current funding infrastructure for socially engaged artistic practice and (3) open up fruitful new avenues for research into the broader cultural politics of labour conditions in participatory creative practice.
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