Rimi Khan is a Research Fellow and Audrey Yue is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at University of Melbourne. They are both currently involved in an ARC-funded Linkage Project called ‘Multiculturalism and Governance: Evaluating Arts Policies and Engaging Cultural Citizenship’ which seeks to develop cultural indicators for local, state and federal government cultural agencies.

From everyday life to policy: capturing the complexities of cultural participation

Cultural indicators exist at the intersection between culture and government. As such, they necessarily operate at a certain level of abstraction; complex processes of cultural participation, experience and exchange are translated into categories that are deemed to have policy relevance. However, there is a need to better understand the relationship between the multi-dimensional and ‘messy’ realities of cultural participation and the policy categories they supposedly give rise to. In other words, methodologies for developing cultural indicators need to be better attuned to the relationship between policy rationales and the rationales of everyday life.

Prevailing approaches to cultural indicators have tended to define the ‘value’ and ‘impacts’ of culture in policy terms, such as ‘quality of life’, ‘wellbeing’ or ‘social inclusion’. In doing so, little reference is made to how such ‘value’ is defined by the participants of culture themselves. In some cases this has led to a certain circularity – cultural indicator frameworks measure the amount of culture, or the degree of access to culture, without interrogating the kinds of significance cultural participation actually has, and without allowing for the various manifestations this might take for diverse communities. This paper considers how rationales and narratives of cultural participation might be captured and understood through ethnographic and other kinds of qualitative methodologies. It examines the challenges involved in translating these narratives into frameworks of measurement.

The research presented in this paper emerges from an ARC funded Linkage Project involving the University of Melbourne, City of Whittlesea Arts Victoria, Victorian Multicultural Commission and the Australia Council.