Leila Jancovich awarded £200,000 research grant addressing failure in cultural participation
Leila Jancovich awarded £200,000 research grant addressing failure in cultural participation
Dr Leila Jancovich has successfully received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a project on Cultural Participation; Stories of success, histories of failure.
Leila has been awarded £200,000 to explore the value of recognising and understanding failure in cultural participation policies and projects. Dr David Stevenson, Head of Division Media, Communication and Performing Arts at Queen Margarets University, Edinburgh will be co-investigator on the project.
The project will move beyond the tendency to make the ‘case for culture’, which is prevalent both in academic and policy documents, by providing space for alternative voices and stories to be heard. In doing so the research will seek to disrupt the assumptions upon which existing policy processes and practices are sustained and reproduced. It will present alternative stories of failure, with the intention to encourage new routes for future policy intervention intended to support cultural participation.
Dr Leila Jancovich, Programme leader MA Culture, Creativity, Entrepreneurship at the University of Leeds said:
“I am really excited to be working with Dr David Stevenson from Queen Margarets University in Edinburgh on this research. We have both been working separately for a number of years arguing that the participation agenda has taken a performative turn, which acts to legitimise rather than challenge the status quo. By using a participatory methodological approach the aim of this research is to encourage policy makers and cultural practitioners to work alongside us to develop new techniques and methods from which to encourage learning from acknowledging failure and in turn facilitate cultural change.
