Professor Candace Jones presents the findings of her research around Edinburgh's festivals
Watch the recording of Professor Jones' webinar 'Performing Culture: Arts festivals as cultural relations'
Watch the webinar here
Abstract
Festivals, whether curated or open, connect artists with audiences. Festivals are also a key tool in cultural diplomacy and are used to cultivate relations and enhance understanding between countries and peoples. In this study, I examine a ten-year programme, which acted as a cultural broker, around Edinburgh's festivals to innovate through developing artistic collaborations for new works or transferring existing works to new contexts, and also engaging in cultural change through establishing relations between people and countries. The data provide an opportunity to examine natural experiments where two different approaches were employed and overlapped: a focus on developing country relations through art versus a focus on specific art forms that engaged in different countries and led to distinct approaches for cultivating relations and outcomes in terms of types of collaborations.
Speaker
Candace Jones is the Chair of Global Creative Enterprise at the University of Edinburgh Business School. Her research examines strategies, discourse, social networks and trajectories of creative industries She works with Historic Environment Scotland, Edinburgh International Festival and Festivals Edinburgh, and leads Edinburgh Futures Institute MSc on creative industries.
She co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries (2015). She has published in top journals, including Academy of Management Review, Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science and Organization Studies. She is a member of the A.H.R.C. funded Policy and Evidence Center for Creative Industries and was funded by the Danish government to analyse The Impact of Material Artifacts and Visual Representations on the Institutionalization of Innovations. She was Chair of the Organization and Management Theory division of the Academy of Management from 2012-2016.
