Waiting is over! The book Engagement with Culture in Transformative Times: Mapping the Societal Drivers and Impacts of Cultural Understandings, Practices, Perceptions, and Values across Europe, edited by Susanne Janssen, Nete Kristensen and Marc Verboord, is published by Routledge. It is available open access at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003460497.
The book is the main outcome of INVENT: European Inventory of Societal Values of Culture as Basis for Inclusive Cultural Policies, a project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme for 2020-2023, in which the Tampere Group for Sociology of Culture participated as one of the research team partners from nine European countries.
Description:
At the heart of this volume are the questions: What does culture mean to European citizens in the face of globalisation, digitalisation, diversity, and social inequality? How do Europeans engage with culture in its various forms, and what societal values are tied to this cultural engagement? These questions are explored in depth across the 15 chapters of this book. By delving into the understandings, practices, perceptions, affordances, and impacts of culture, this book advances the study of the societal values of culture in contemporary European societies, offering insights beneficial to both research and cultural policy work.
The book stands out with its five unique features. It embraces an inclusive conception of culture, spanning the arts, popular culture, and everyday cultural practices, both offline and online. It takes a grassroots approach, starting from the cultural understandings and experiences of European citizens. It employs a comparative method involving people from diverse socio-economic groups in nine European countries – with different cultural policy models, social-structural features, socio-cultural value orientations, and media systems. It builds on a multi- and mixed-methods approach, including a large-scale survey, a smartphone study with experimental stimuli, several phases of online content data collection and analysis, qualitative interviews, and focus groups. Finally, it delves into how wide-ranging and interconnected sociocultural transformations such as migration, digitalisation, and social inequality impact people’s understanding of and engagement with culture as well as the meanings and values they attribute to culture. These unique features promise to offer a fresh and comprehensive perspective on cultural engagement in contemporary European societies.
The collection showcases the multiple, often contradictory concepts and understandings of culture and its societal values among social groups within and across European societies. The findings call for a “social turn” in cultural policy that extends beyond traditional arts and culture to support diverse cultural expressions that may enhance social values, address complex social issues, and shift the focus from economic objectives to promoting civic solidarity, equity, inclusivity, tolerance, and shared community values.
The volume includes 15 chapters besides the Introduction by the Editors, of which as many as 6 chapters are co-authored by at least one member of the Tampere Group for Sociology of Culture. These chapters are:
Chapter 1: Understandings of culture in nine European countries: advancing the study of cultural stratification, by Semi Purhonen, Višnja Kisić, Goran Tomka, Ossi Sirkka, and Philippe Bonnet;
Chapter 4: Understandings of culture in digital space: mapping Twitter discourses on culture, by Lucas Page Pereira, Jinju Kim, Ossi Sirkka, Leonora Dugonjic-Rodwin, and Charlotte Edy;
Chapter 6: Europeans’ perspectives on the cultural impacts of globalisation and migration, by Tally Katz-Gerro, Neta Yodovich, Jörg Rössel, Sara Sivonen, and Joan Llonch-Andreu;
Chapter 8: The impact of digitalisation in everyday life: citizens’ perspectives on the rise of digital media, by Eva Myrczik, Leonora Dugonjic-Rodwin, Charlotte Edy, Semi Purhonen, Albert Sánchez-Gelabert, and Iva Žunić;
Chapter 9: Migrants’ engagement with digital culture: active two-way use, Internet enthusiasm, digital dislike, and social media sociability, by Franziska Marquart, Riie Heikkilä, Susanne Janssen, and Giuseppe Lamberti;
Chapter 13: Different modes of openness and tolerance in Europeans’ cultural participation, by Riie Heikkilä, Sylvia Holla, Željka Zdravković, and Giuseppe Lamberti.
Thanks for our collaborators and, especially, the Editors of the book. Check it out!