European inventory of
societal values of culture

Miles & Gibson - Everyday participation and cultural value

Miles, A. & Gibson, L. (Eds.) (2016). Everyday participation and cultural value. Special Issue Cultural Trends 25(3).

The articles in this special issue present some of the early findings of Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values (UEP), a five-year large grant project, which began in 2012 and is part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme, receiving supplementary funding from Creative Scotland. The project starts from the proposition that the orientation of cultural policy and state-funded cultural programming towards cultural participation and value is in need of a radical overhaul. The authors argue that there is an orthodoxy of approach to cultural engagement which is based on a narrow definition (and understanding) of participation, one that focuses on a limited set of cultural forms, activities and associated cultural institutions but which, in the process, obscures the significance of other forms of cultural participation which are situated locally in the everyday realm.