Session Information
06 SES 01, New Types of Learning
Paper Session
Contribution
The paper will discuss the ways, in which the analysis of local cultural situation could be translated into educational frameworks of teaching Cultural management in the Post-Soviet urban environment. It will draw upon the experience of a particular institution – the Ekaterinburg Academy of Contemporary Art (hereafter the EACA) and the results of sociological survey carried out in Ekaterinburg (Russia), which measured the levels of satisfaction on the part of the citizens with the accessibility and the quality of the cultural services. Being a “metropolitan university,” in the sense described by David Soo (Soo 2010), as it is funded by municipality through local taxes, the EACA sees its mission in training highly skilled cadres for the cultural infrastructures of Ekaterinburg and the Ural region.
The main body of the presentation is a report on the results of the sociological survey carried out by the EACA in 2009 and 2010. This survey examined: 1. the existing demand in cultural and leisure services in Ekaterinburg; 2. the offer of cultural services by the municipally and regionally funded cultural institutions; 3. the levels of satisfaction on the part of the consumers with the accessibility and the quality of cultural services; 4. the strategies of consumer behavior on the part of various cultural subjects. The results of the survey demonstrate that cultural institutions, which operate on the state budget (such as theaters, public libraries and museums) seriously lose in competition to both profit-oriented cultural and leisure enterprises (such as cinemas, bowling centers, aqua-parks, clubs, etc.) and to the institutions offering unique and elite cultural products (such as private galleries, private theaters, etc.). Paradoxically, the low attendance rate of the state-funded cultural enterprises (only one in five of Ekaterinburg citizens have ever visited at least one institution) concurs with the high level of satisfaction on the part of the attending customers (most institutions scored 4.5 on the 1 to 5 customer satisfaction scale). Although further research is needed in order to identify the exact reasons for low attendance, it is already clear that the cultural sector in Ekaterinburg demonstrates certain neo-liberal tendencies: those cultural institutions, which are heavily subsidized and, hence, accessible to the public, seem to be ignored and marginalized by and large. This neo-liberal trend undermines the public mission of cultural institutions intended for broader audiences and compromises the role of culture as the backbone of the public sphere, inclusive of economically and socially disadvantaged social groups.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Evans, Graeme, Cultural Planning: An Urban Resistance. London: Routledge, 2001. Soo, David, “An Added Dimension of Mission: Metropolitan Colleges and Universities,” in Perspectives on Urban Education, 2010 (Fall), 35-39.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.