Since the foundation in 1959 of the Ministry of Culture, cultural policy in France has enjoyed a profile unparalleled in any other country. French Cultural Policy Debates: A Reader makes available the key contributions to a debate which has not only focused on the precise modes of political intervention in cultural production, but has also provided a forum for the discussion of much wider social and political issues.
This study considers contemporary policies for the arts in France and the cultural and political issues they have raised. The author concentrates mainly on the Mitterrand years and the various influences which marked them.
In this invaluable reference work, the world’s foremost authorities on France’s political, social, cultural, and intellectual history explore the history and meaning of the French Republic and the challenges it has faced. Founded in 1792, the French Republic has been defined and redefined by a succession of regimes and institutions, a multiplicity of symbols, and a plurality of meanings, ideas, and values. Although constantly in flux, the Republic has nonetheless produced a set of core ideals and practices fundamental to modern France's political culture and democratic life. Based on the influential Dictionnaire critique de la république, published in France in 2002, The French Republic provides an encyclopedic survey of French republicanism since the Enlightenment. Divided into three sections—Time and History, Principles and Values, and Dilemmas and Debates—The French Republic begins by examining each of France’s five Republics and its two authoritarian interludes, the Second Empire and Vichy. It then offers thematic essays on such topics as Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity; laicity; citizenship; the press; immigration; decolonization; anti-Semitism; gender; the family; cultural policy; and the Muslim headscarf debates. Each essay includes a brief guide to further reading. This volume features updated translations of some of the most important essays from the French edition, as well as twenty-two newly commissioned English-language essays, for a total of forty entries. Taken together, they provide a state-of-the art appraisal of French republicanism and its role in shaping contemporary France’s public and private life.
Intellectuals and policy analysts might appear to inhabit two different worlds. Intellectuals aspire to articulate issues of universal concern; policy analysts attend to the detail of specific measures and programmes. How far do these common assumptions match up to reality? What happens when intellectuals engage with cultural institutions and the m
French intellectuals have always defined themselves in political terms, typically as opponents to a corrupt government—but challenging state authority is not the only way intellectuals in France have exerted political influence. Jeremy Aherne invokes a neglected dimension of French intellectuals’ practice, where instead of denouncing the worlds of government and public policy, French intellectuals become voluntarily entangled within them The book consists of a series of case studies exploring policy domains from religion and secularization to educational reform and the media. It explores the political engagement of intellectuals such as Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau, and André Malraux, and will be required reading for scholars of French political and social history.
Cultural policy intersects with political, economic, and socio-cultural dynamics at all levels of society, placing high and often contradictory expectations on the capabilities and capacities of the media, the fine, performing, and folk arts, and cultural heritage. These expectations are articulated, mobilised and contested at – and across – a global scale. As a result, the study of cultural policy has firmly established itself as a field that cuts across a range of academic disciplines, including sociology, cultural and media studies, economics, anthropology, area studies, languages, geography, and law. This Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy sets out to broaden the field’s consideration to recognise the necessity for international and global perspectives. The book explores how cultural policy has become a global phenomenon. It brings together a diverse range of researchers whose work reveals how cultural policy expresses and realises common global concerns, dominant narratives, and geopolitical economic and social inequalities. The sections of the book address cultural policy’s relation to core academic disciplines and core questions, of regulations, rights, development, practice, and global issues. With a cross-section of country-by-country case studies, this comprehensive volume is a map for academics and students seeking to become more globally orientated cultural policy scholars.
“a fascinating, thorough and expertly argued discussion of the modes and practices of cultural policy in an increasingly globalized and neoliberal world.” European Journal of Communication Rethinking Cultural Policy addresses issues concerning culture, economy and power in the age of new-liberal globalization. It examines how public cultural policies have been rationalized in the past and how they are being rethought. Arguing that the study of culture and policy should not be confined to prevailing governmental agendas, the book offers a distinctive and independent analysis of cultural policy. The book examines a wide range of issues in cultural policy and blends a close reading of key theories with case studies. Topics covered include: Branding culture and exploitation The state, market and civil society How visitor attractions such as London's Millennium Dome are used for national aggrandizement and corporate business purposes Cultural development, diversity and ecological tourism in poorer parts of the world This is the ideal introduction to contemporary cultural policy for undergraduate students in culture and media studies, sociology of culture, politics, arts administration and cultural management courses, as well as postgraduates and researchers.
This volume, which gathers contributions presented at the annual conferences of l'Association pour le développement de l'histoire culturelle (ADHC), questions the subjects and boundaries of cultural history in France – with regard to neighboring approaches such as cultural studies, media studies, and gender studies – to elaborate a "social history of representations." Historians, philosophers and sociologists address a large variety of topics and methodological proposals. Definitions, objects and actors, memories and cultural transfers: this book depicts the major questions that underlie the historical debate at the beginning of the 21st century.
This book places the study of public support for the arts and culture within the prism of public policy making. It is explicitly comparative in casting cultural policy within a broad sociopolitical and historical framework. Given the complexity of national communities, there has been an absence of comparative analyses that would explain the wide variability in modes of cultural policy as reflections of public cultures and cultural identity. The discussion is internationally focused and interdisciplinary. Mulcahy contextualizes a wide variety of cultural policies and their relation to politics and identity by asking a basic question: who gets their heritage valorized and by whom is this done? The fundamental assumption is that culture is at the heart of public policy as it defines national identity and personal value.
The book is an interdisciplinary exploration of the complexities of ‘popular’ culture as a category of public policy. It approaches the notions of ‘cultural policy’ and ‘popular culture’ flexibly, examining what each comes to mean, explicitly or implicitly, in relation to the other. This generates a rich variety of approaches, but also a number of identifiable commonalities. We start from the proposition that 'popular culture' is largely absent as an explicit category of arts policy and debate today. The ‘arts’ are still, in practice, construed in terms of elite culture (despite claims to the contrary), while artefacts such as popular music, television, fashion, and so on are assumed to figure among the cultural or creative ‘industries’, giving the popular a set of narrowly economic, professional and commodity connotations. And yet, the popular is, in a range of ways, powerfully present as an implicit dimension of public policy and as a catalyst of cultural practices and attitudes. This apparent paradox underpins the proposal. The book is a collaboration between two UK-based institutions: the University of Leeds’s Popular Cultures Research Network and the well established Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. This book was originally published as a special issue of International Journal of Cultural Policy.