Special issue : everyday participation and cultural value. Part 1

The articles in this special issue present some of the early findings of Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values (UEP), a five-year large grant project, which began in 2012 and is part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme, receiving supplementary funding from Creative Scotland. The project starts from the proposition that the orientation of cultural policy and state-funded cultural programming towards cultural participation and value is in need of a radical overhaul. The guest editors argue that there is an orthodoxy of approach to cultural engagement which is based on a narrow definition (and understanding) of participation, one that focuses on a limited set of cultural forms, activities and associated cultural institutions but which, in the process, obscures the significance of other forms of cultural participation which are situated locally in the everyday realm. Papers in this first volume (Issue 3 September 2016) of the Special Issue present and discuss project work that addresses the theoretical and methodological framings for understanding cultural participation and value. Papers in the second issue (Issue 1 March 2017), which focus more specifically on research in the cultural ecosystem case study locations, will address the vernacular components of cultural value, issues of creative economy and the cultural signatures of place. First in the current issue, Jill Ebrey’s article provides us with a broad theoretical framing of the notion of “the everyday”, in which she unpacks and relates central themes in historical and sociological writing on everyday life. In doing so, she discusses the ways in which the quotidian became a subject of scrutiny and analysis and then a space of political resistance and change. The next three articles (by Mark Taylor, Andrew Miles and Lisanne Gibson and Delyth Edwards) provide a snapshot of the multimodality of the UEP project. Reporting on elements of the quantitative, ethnographic and interview-based components of the research, they all reveal some of the variety and richness of people’s everyday cultural participation. Crucially, however, they also show the ways in which these forms of participation are embedded in value systems that work to relegate, obscure or deflect attention from their importance in negotiating personal relationships and shaping social life.