This course offers students interested in investigating some of the most pressing issues facing the arts today the opportunity to work closely with practitioners in the cultural field to help define the big questions and propose the necessary research programs and policy directions to provoke, unsettle, challenge, and offer new direction to the field. Arts organizations, funding agencies, patrons and audiences tend to be especially risk-averse in difficult economic eras, a time when the arts get readily labeled a luxury and support drops to low priority. But it is precisely in such unsettled times that new forms of cultural production and consumption can emerge, new organizational models for the arts can be imagined and tried, and the status quo in the cultural sector can be challenged, creating a new opportunity for critical cultural policy analysis to make an impact. The course will combine the format of a seminar and a workshop, with students working in collaboration with Cultural Policy Center-affiliated arts consultants on specific hot button topics of importance to the field. The goal will be to produce a series of provocation papersrooted in research, but framing some new questions and approaches for the arts and culture field. Course work will include substantive background reading in cultural policy, researching, writing, and public presentations of the topics.
