The goals of cultural democracy, diversity and equity are political – they cannot simply be fixed by new funding streams or professional development schemes, argue Steven Hadley, Brea Heidelberg and Eleonora Belfiore.
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Reflexivity and the perpetuation of inequality in the cultural sector: half awake in a fake empire? (Taylor & Francis Online)
The main argument this article makes is that there will be little progress towards a more emancipatory and democratic cultural policy – in the UK or the US – unless the goals of cultural democracy, diversity and equity are first and foremost treated as issues of politics and culture, rather than as cultural policy problems that can be fixed by new initiatives, funding streams, or professional development schemes targeted at minoritized ethnic groups, women, people with disabilities and other historically excluded groups within the cultural sector and/or its audiences. As hill and Sobande (2018) argue, ‘without transformational and structural changes, increased surface-level representation is meaningless’ (p. 109).
For the purposes of this discussion, we consider reflexivity to embrace the multi-level, analytic attention to how the researcher is intimately involved in the research process/product. In considering the current discourse around cultural democracy, diversity and equity, we argue that a lack of self-reflexivity within both academia and the cultural sector risks neutralising the potential for change at the exact moment when it could most be realised... Keep reading on Taylor & Francis Online.