Researchers working within the domain of 'Arts, Cultural Practices & Participation" examine how participation, engagement, and mediation are constituted, negotiated and transformed within artistic and cultural practices. The unit conducts and advances both fundamental and practice-oriented research on the embeddedness of the arts and culture in the wider society, with a particular focus on arts participation, cultural mediation, and arts education.
The research is grounded in an interdisciplinary constellation of conceptual frameworks, including educational frameworks (multiliteracies, UDL, emancipatory and public pedagogy), theories of art and society (multimodality, sociology of art), and broader sociological approaches (critical disability studies, cultural studies, theories of youth culture and digitalisation). This theoretical grounding enables a critical interrogation of how artistic and cultural practices intersect with social, political, and institutional dynamics, and how these intersections shape possibilities for participation and engagement.
Across a range of research themes, the unit aims to advance more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable forms of cultural participation, particularly in relation to groups experiencing structural barriers to access. In this context, the unit investigates innovative strategies and methodologies that foster active engagement and co-creation, while critically reconfiguring dominant understandings of participation and inclusion.
Indicative research questions:
- ‘What role does cultural mediation (i.e. understood as the facilitation of engagement and the fostering of reciprocal learning between artists, artworks, and audiences) play in processes of social change?’
- ‘How do digital technologies, virtual platforms, and immersive environments reconfigure access to the arts and generate new forms of participation and engagement?’
- ‘How can barriers to participation for disability artists and audiences with a disability be critically understood, and how are such barriers negotiated in practice? What do these dynamics reveal about dominant assumptions in aesthetics, access, and spectatorship?’