On 21 September 2020 Carola Boehm (Professor of Arts and Higher Education, Staffordshire University) delivered a 15 minutes introductory session on Culture 3.0 concepts, and how they relate to the challenges of making arts and culture more accessible and more diverse.

It provides a good introduction to Luigi Sacco’s Culture 3.0 concepts, and Carola’s own application of these concepts to the UK creative industry contexts.

Abstract

The homicide of George Floyd in America, the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo campaigns have increased both the urgency and the profile of tackling discrimination, exclusionary practices, and institutionalised racism and thus provide a momentum that allows us all to push harder towards  achieving a more inclusive society with fair and equal access to our arts and culture sectors.. In this talk, I will not only explore the details of existing inequalities but put forward solutions for  shaping arts and culture towards becoming more diverse.

My own area is music technology, in general dominated by individuals who identify as being male. The whole cultural music sector, including classical music, has only 32% female artists. Museums on the other hand have 57%. Dance is an artistic practice that has the highest diversity with 18% BME workforce, compared to Museum having the lowest with 6%. Theatre and Visual Arts have the highest of LGBT artists with 9% with Museums only having 3%. This can also be sliced geographically, with  London having the highest diversity (15% BME), the Southwest having the lowest (6%), Midlands having the highest workforce (53%) identifying as female and London the lowest (42%) (ACE, 2019)

As individual creative professionals we often tend to think that the arts are ‘colour-blind’, but increasingly we have to accept that our cultural organisations, our creative funding models and our markers of quality provide barriers of access that are unevenly distributed in society. In this talk, I will present some initiatives and projects that Staffordshire University is carrying out in this area, all aimed to support Equality, Diversity and Inclusion challenges within our arts and cultural sectors. Terms I will use in this talk are co-production, cultural democracy, co-ownership and “Culture 1.0 to 3.0 ecosystems” (Boehm, 2016, 2017).

ACE (2019). Equality, Diversity and the Creative Case. A data report. ACE 2018 – 2019. [Online]. Manchester. Available from: https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/ACE_DiversityReport_Final_03032020_0.pdf.

Boehm, C. (2016). Academia in Culture 3.0: A Crime Story of Death and Birth (but also of Curation, Innovation and Sector Mash-ups). REPERTARIO: Teatro & Danca. 19 (2). p.pp. 37–48.

Boehm, C. (2017). The end of a Golden Era of British Music? Exploration of educational gaps in the current UK creative industry strategy. In: R. Hepworth-Sawyer, J. Hodgson, J. Paterson, & R. Toulson (eds.). Innovation In Music: performance, production, technology and business. Taylor & Francis/Routledge.