Folkrörelserna uppstod i en tid av stora samhällsförändringar och på samma sätt utvecklas nutidens ideella kultursektor i takt med samhället så som det förändras idag. Hur kan den ideella kultursektorn vara del av lösningar på samhällsutmaningar? Vilken roll har den och hur ser de på sin egen roll i samhällsutvecklingen?

Många menar att den ideella kultursektorns insatser på många sätt utgör grunden för vårt offentliga kulturutbud och är avgörande för att invånare i hela landet ska kunna utöva och uppleva kultur. Trots detta har den länge haft en marginaliserad roll i diskussionen om civilsamhällets betydelse och värde för samhällsutvecklingen, och det är svårt att hitta forskning. Vi på Kulturförvaltningen har framförallt upplevt att det funnits en brist på samlad kunskap. Därför beställde vi den här kunskapsöversikten som vi nu vill sprida och dela med oss av till alla som liksom vi saknat en sådan. Förhoppningen är att den kan bidra till att öka kunskapen om den ideella kultursektorn och dess samhällsrelevans. 

Cultural policy has seen a shift from attention to the producers of culture to consumers of culture, often called the participatory turn. Widened participation is a common argument for subsidising publicly funded arts; however, when realising participation as a policy goal, it can be fraught with tension. This paper aims to expand the knowledge of how cultural institutions resist participation. When is participation seen as problematic or undesirable, and why? How do cultural institution workers legitimise limiting participation? The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with civil servants and managers of publicly funded cultural institutions in Gothenburg, Sweden, focusing on rationalities of balancing values based on problematisations of participation and discourses around the institution's core mission. The respondents balance serving the public and the cultural field, popular knowledge and expert knowledge, and their professional and private roles. The article offers a model for understanding when certain balancing acts are more likely to occur than others. Ultimately, resistance towards participation relates to different ideas around the governance of culture.

Executive Summary

Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture (AMASS) is an EU Horizon 2020 research project funded under the theme of Societal Challenges and the Arts, which focuses on the cultural rights perspective of marginalisation and its effects on other forms of exclusion in Europe. Using arts-based interventions, this project aims to address marginalisation challenges through community involvement and community building. 

This white paper compiles the outcomes of research studies and previous arts interventions (Section One) and the European testbed of arts-based interventions (Section Two). These insights form the basis of the identified needs and corresponding recommendations, which can be read in Section Three. Below is a summary of the sections. 

As part of the AMASS project, qualitative and systematic literature reviews were performed to understand the current research discourse on the assessment of arts-based interventions with a social focus in Europe. According to our analysis, culture and the arts are framed as participatory, sometimes therapeutic, means of empowering individuals and communities to assert agency over their own lives, develop and express their identities and strengthen local learning and development initiatives. Our results also point to effects that can beproblematised as negative, such as the social reproduction of dominant groups’ values and practices at the expense of marginalised groups. Thus, the arts are not a given good but can depend on context. Previous arts-based interventions often lacked the personnel and financial resources to continue after the end of the funding period. In many cases, the assessment of project results was anecdotal or lacking. As a result, the power of the arts for social well-being and cultural integration could not be convincingly revealed. 

The AMASS European testbed included 35 arts-based case studies to evaluate the impact of these approaches in addressing marginalisation. The outcomes of these testbeds were compiled around tasks designed to achieve the following: 

1. Develop and sustain innovative artsbased projects 

2. Collect, analyse and evaluate data to measure the impact of the projects 

3. Encourage active participation as an added value 

4. Promote networking and new modes of dissemination to increase impact 

5. Sustainable use of public spaces to engage communities 

6. Renew the promotion of culture using technology 

7. Support cognitive development through art education

This article explores the broad and undefined research field of the social impact of the arts. The effects of art and culture are often used as justification for public funding, but the research on these interventions and their effects is unclear. Using a co-word analysis of over 10,000 articles published between 1990 and 2020, we examined the characteristics of the field as we have operationalised it through our searches. We found that since 2015 this research field has expanded and consists of different epistemologies and methodologies, summarised in largely overlapping subfields belonging to the social sciences, humanities, arts education, and arts and health/therapy. In formal or informal learning settings, studies of theatre/drama as an intervention to enhance skills, well-being, or knowledge among children are most common in our corpus. A study of the research front through the bibliographic coupling of the most cited articles in the corpus confirmed the co-word analysis and revealed new themes that together form the ground for insight into research on the social impact of the arts. This article can therefore inform discussions on the social value of culture and the arts. 

With this paper, from the perspective of ethics at the workplace, we problematize the taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in the use of artistic freedom in creative processes. Drawing on the notion of inequality regimes (e.g. Acker, 2006) and using empirical material from a performing arts organization in Sweden, we explore how the assumptions of artistic freedom facilitate and legitimize the emergence of inequality regimes in invisible and subtle manners. Our findings indicate that non-reflexive interpretations of the concept of artistic freedom result in ethical dilemmas that impact the organization's pursuits of equality work. The aesthetic ethics oriented around the notion of ‘art for the sake of art’ tends to camouflage the centralization of aesthetic authority in processes where formal hierarchical structures are missing. Consequently, asymmetrical power relations between the Directors, actors, and producers are legitimized. Ethics of quality of art and that of the social ideal of equality have been constructed as dichotomic notions indicating that aesthetic ethics of art can only be preserved at the expense of social objectives of equality. We argue that the current interpretative practices of ‘artistic freedom’ in some cultural organizations add little value of ethics to the freedom of expressing artistic opinions and in achieving the social ideal of equality but lead to the emergence of inequality regimes in the artistic work processes. 

In this article, we present the analysis of a state-of-the-art review made as part of the Horizon 2020 EU-funded project AMASS (Acting on the Margins: Arts as SocialSculpture), which aims to address challenges of marginalisation in Europe through arts-based interventions. This study analyses researched-based materials on the social impact of the arts, theoretically underpinned by an understanding of the role of the arts in conjunction with the problematisation of social marginalisation. We found three ways to understand the social impact of the arts in the material; as a participatory means to agency and empowerment, identity and expression, and learning and development. These categories are related to analytically derived positions of marginalisation as predominantly structural- or more individual-based. Art is conceived of as a way to bridge these positions through an understanding of its educational qualities. These categories offer a fruitful but also potentially limited role of the arts in society.