Showing the arts and Humanities matter
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UCL,18th September 2012
Redefining ‘value’:
the arts, humanities and the
challenges of contemporary
life
Dr Eleonora Belfiore* & Dr Anna Upchurch**
* Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick,
e.belfiore@warwick.ac.uk, @elebelfiore & #culturalvalue
**School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds,
a.upchurch@leeds.ac.uk
The project
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 Antefact: Development of a
humanities-based approach to the
exploration of the ‘social impact
of the arts’ debate
The establishment of an intellectual connection
with Duke University, US
A research collaboration resulting in the
forthcoming Humanities in the 21st Century:
Beyond Utility and Markets (Palgrave)
The ‘impact agenda’:
The arts/humanities parallel /1
 The
double rhetoric: doom and gloom vs.
great expectations
 Notions of ‘impact’ and public ‘utility’ of
the Humanities as proxy for discussions of
their value
 The encroachment of market values: The
language of public funding as ‘investment’
(with the attendant expectation of
quantifiable returns on tax payers’
investment)
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The ‘impact agenda’:
The arts/humanities parallel /2
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The question of how to
‘articulate’/‘capture’/measure impact/public
utility/value as a means to justify demands on the
public purse
 A false and unhelpful dichotomy between
‘instrumental’ and ‘intrinsic’ value of both arts and
humanities
 Difficult questions which remain open: how to
deal with the unmeasurable? And what about the
‘futility’ of the arts/humanities?
 A parallel between US & UK debates
The Arts/Humanities parallel
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TomNightingale on the BBC Newsnight
comment web page:
“There are strong cases for publicly funding street
lighting, hospitals, schools and many other goods
and services. What is the value of arts beyond
private enjoyment. I, and many others, enjoy fish
and chips. Should chippies be subsidised? A bag of
fish and chips beats the pants off anything either
Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst ever produced”.
Crisis in the Humanities? A checklist
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 The ‘image’ problem and perceived lack of
relevance and credibility
 Charges of ‘uselessness’
 “Knowledge economy policy increasingly
tends to evaluate the worth of knowledge
along economic lines rather than as a social
good. […] Traditional arts and Humanities
faculties fare poorly according to this new
rubric”. (Bullen at al. 2004, 3-4 and 8).
 The confidence issue (a “self-inflicted
indignity?”)
Fighting the crisis: the impact
agenda in the UK
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 A linguistic and ideological shift from ‘funding’ to
‘investment’ in Humanities research
 Referring to impact seems a way to bypass the
question of articulating the value of the humanities
and to sidestep value-laden and therefore difficult
debates
 Socio-economic impact = An external form of
validation and legitimacy.
 A market society version of the idea of the public
university? Or…
 A way to re-legitimise old privileges of the ivory
tower?
Our approach
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 Beyond critique: A more constructive attempt to
show how A&H research is already involved in
making a contribution to dealing with the
problems of today
How should humanists approach the value question? By
striving to demonstrate more convincingly what impact they
might have or – rather – by challenging the dominant market
discourse and its focus on narrow notions of ‘utility’?
 The means: asking non-Humanities scholars to
reflect on how values, approaches, ideas from the
A&H have shaped their own research, field or
professional practice.
A&H thinking and contemporary
issues – 3 examples
 3 authors take ethical and philosophical
approaches to thinking about contemporary
challenges and solving problems that confront
society and the planet
Authors present alternatives to instrumental,
market-oriented thinking
Intellectual Property and ‘implicit contracts’
Nature-society or animal-human relationships
Organisational behaviour that refreshes an
individual’s ethical values
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A&H thinking and contemporary
issues
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Intellectual Property and ‘implicit contracts’
Rick McGeer, HP scientist in Palo Alto, CA argues
that digitization has broken the ‘implicit contract’
between content producers and consumers
Before digitization: producers provided creative
works to consumers, who could read, loan, resell,
copy excerpts, without paying royalties to content
owner – this was the implicit contract
Digitization has exposed different understandings
of that ‘contract’ between producers and
consumers who offer interpretations favorable to
their interests
A&H thinking and contemporary
issues
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Now tensions between producers and consumers
and even criminalization of copyright infringement
in the USA
 Technology that has enhanced human
communications also has the capacity to censor, ie,
Amazon’s removal of content from Kindles
Rick concludes that the debate is too important to
be left to the self-interested motivated by financial
gain; he appeals to humanists to get involved
Humanists as interpreters of enduring values
A&H thinking and contemporary
issues
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 The human-animal relationship
Connie Johnston, US geographer, Clark University
 Writes that humanistic thinking characterized by
approach, a ‘slowing down’ to consider life, that is
connected to ‘idea of process and the search for
meaning(s).’
Ideas about ‘the human’ and ‘agency’ under
scrutiny by nature-society geographers
 This perspective essential to geography which
often asks the ‘why of where’ questions
A&H thinking and contemporary
issues
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Connie Johnston, US geographer, Clark University
 Focuses attention on time and space,
interconnectedness of nature and society –
fundamentally humanistic concerns, she argues
Many animal geographers, like Johnston, take a
humanistic, interpretive approach to analysis of
human-animal boundaries and how humans know
the non-human world
Questions around animal food production and its
impact on the planet
A&H thinking and contemporary
issues
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 Organisational behaviour that refreshes an
individual’s ethical values
Anna Upchurch and Jean McLaughlin, director of
the Penland School of Crafts in the US
Penland is a national, non-profit, craft education
resource in North Carolina mountains operating
since 1929
Its roots are in arts and crafts revival and in antipoverty programmes by Protestant churches and US
government in the 1930s in Appalachia
A&H thinking and contemporary
issues
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 Organisational behaviour that refreshes an
individual’s ethical values
Research question: How can an organisation that
is fundamentally anti-modern survive and thrive?
Humanist thinking drives organisational behaviour
10 ‘core values’ reinforce mutual respect,
tolerance, reciprocity, creativity, and care for the
historic campus and the environment
Reinforces universal human values of
‘benevolence’ and ‘universalism’ needed to combat
global issues like overpopulation, climate change
Concluding thoughts
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 The impact discourse is problematic not because it
demands too much of A&H, but because it demands too
little!!
 The impact discourse is predicated on a view of impact
and an economics-based notion of utility as a proxy for
value: this is narrow and limiting
 Hijacking the impact agenda: impact needs to be
reformulated in terms of what should be expected from
a public institution such as the university
 Universities need to provide much more than mere
‘impact’!
 The A&Hs are already ‘delivering’ on this ‘key target’ –
they have been for about 2,500 years!