[Culturetalk] Making Culture Count: rethinking measures of cultural vitality, well being, and citizenship

[Marnie Badham]

Dear Colleagues,

Please find the attached "First Call for Papers" for the upcoming
conference in Melbourne, Australia: *Making Culture Count: rethinking
measures of cultural vitality, well being, and citizenship.  The deadline
for the "first call for papers" is December 9, 2011.  *This international
conference is presented in Melbourne on *May 3-4, 2012, *by the Cultural
Development Network and the Centre for Cultural Partnerships, Faculty of
the VCA and Music, University of Melbourne.
*
*
*For more information see: **www.culturaldevelopment.net.au*
*
*
Can you please forward this call to contacts you feel would be interested
in this conference? Thanks!

Kind regards,



*Marnie Badham, Research Fellow**
Centre for Cultural Partnerships, University of Melbourne*
[mobile] 011 61448590948,  [skype] marniebadham

*There is a crack in everything... that's how the light gets in*. (L. Cohen)




In recent years, culture and cultural development have become
internationally recognised as

important dimensions of contemporary governance and public policy. As in
other policy areas

(economic, social, environmental), the production of accurate and relevant
data has become

central to cultural policy and how the cultural lives of citizens are
understood. Conceptual and

practical developments in measurement tools, such as new forms of cultural
indicators, have the

potential to enrich our understanding of culture's role in well being,
vitality and citizenship. From

UNESCO’s benchmarks for cultural freedom, through comparative measures of
states’ cultural

provision and creative cities indices, to indicators for community arts
evaluation, diverse

approaches to quantifying cultural value and measuring societal progress
now exist.


But how useful are all these measures? Are they helping us to keep track of
what matters? What

opportunities exist to contest, refine or democratise these systems of
cultural measurement?

This international conference brings together diverse perspectives from
international guest

speakers and leading local practitioners to explore the burgeoning field of
cultural indicators.

Participants will engage in a critical dialogue on various approaches to
monitoring, evaluating,

planning, advocating, predicting, and simply understanding, cultural
change. Presentations will

cover a range of theoretical and practical approaches to quantifying
cultural values often

considered intangible, including vitality, well being, citizenship,
sustainability and heritage.


Keynote speakers (so far) include:

Associate Professor Eleonora Belfiore, Director of Graduate Studies, Centre
for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick, UK.

Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, Senior Research Associate and Director,
Creativity and Communities

Program, Urban Institute, Washington DC, USA.

The submission of abstracts for presentations on diverse aspects of
cultural measurement are invited. In particular, proposals that address the
following topics are welcome:


   - Critical accounts of forms of cultural measurement, including cultural
   indicators.
   - The emergence of new cultural measures, such as categories of cultural
   vitality, well being, citizenship, sustainability and heritage.
   - Cross-cultural measurement, the relationship between mechanisms and
   categories of measurement and cultural difference.
   - Community-driven cultural indicators, including attempts to
   democratise the processes of cultural measurement.
   - The use of arts-based processes in the measurement of culture.
   - The implications of new technologies, digital research methods and
   information visualisation for the measurement of culture.
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