“Good” organisational reasons for “ineffectual” research: Evaluating summative evaluation of museums and galleries

New displays, galleries and exhibitions in museums and galleries are increasingly subject to summative evaluations, wide-ranging investigations that examine how visitors respond to and engage with particular initiatives. These evaluations provide insights into the behaviour and attitudes of visitors and the ways in which particular exhibitions, exhibits and information resources facilitate engagement, participation and learning. Unfortunately, however, summative evaluation has relatively little impact either on the particular initiative or more generally in contributing to our knowledge of visitor behaviour and understanding of best practice. In this paper, we suggest that the relative lack of impact of summative evaluation is not primarily due to any methodological shortcomings or the idiosyncrasies of some of the approaches that are used. Rather, the organisational and institutional context in which summative evaluation is commissioned, undertaken and received can impose contradictory demands and undermine the opportunity of learning from and applying the findings of evaluation.     

Theory-based evaluation and the social impact of the arts

The well-documented challenges in researching the social impacts of the arts are closely related to key issues in contemporary social research and evaluation, most particularly the problem of causal attribution. The article contends that some of the most common criticisms of the evidence base for the social impact of the arts relate to the successionist model of change which underpins positivist social science research and evaluation. Illustrating this with reference to research on the arts and quality of life, the article considers the alternative generative understanding of causation that underpins theory-based evaluation (TBE) approaches, favoured recently in the UK as part of the “What Works?” agenda. While these approaches fit well with knowledge about the determinants of arts impact, the article considers whether in fact TBE approaches offer an effective strategy for understanding how and why arts engagement can result in social change. The limitations and possibilities of TBE are considered with reference to four recent UK studies of the impact of the arts on individuals which make use of them.     

“Defensive instrumentalism” and the legacy of New Labour's cultural policies

The paper identifies “defensive instrumentalism” as a main feature that has characterised New Labour's cultural policies, and which constitutes an important aspect of its legacy. Yet, resorting to instrumental arguments to defend the arts and to make a case for their usefulness is hardly an invention of New Labour. However, in the past, such defensive arguments were built into a more constructive and creative attempt to elaborate a coherent theory of art and an intellectually sophisticated view of the effects of the arts on individual and societies. What the paper argues, then, is that instrumentalism under New Labour has retained its longstanding defensive character, but was deprived of the attendant effort to elaborate a positive notion of cultural value.     

‘Envisioning the Past: Art,Historiography and Public History’*

Abstract

This essay considers the role that art and history might play together in public history projects. It discusses public history not in terms of ‘learning lessons’, ‘public debate’ and ‘transferable skills’ but instead in terms of creative thinking in the public sphere. The essay draws upon the author’s experiences of working with artists on a series of exhibitions themed around the history of an arts centre’s late Georgian and Victorian buildings and their inhabitants in Sheffield. It explores the synergies between artistic and historical ways of knowing and argues that collaborations with artists provide an opportunity for academic historians to reengage the imaginative aspects of professional academic history. It also explores the value of art’s expressive power and its potential to pose new questions and suggest new answers for both public and historians’ understanding of the past.     

Self-reported impacts of volunteering in UK zoos and aquariums

ABSTRACT

Zoos and aquariums are popular visitor destinations, with around 30 million visits made to them annually throughout the UK and Ireland. The role and mission of modern zoos have evolved, with the conservation of world’s remaining biodiversity now being their major purpose. They seek to aid biodiversity through a combination of public education, in situ and ex situ conservation programmes, and applied scientific research. Directly relevant to this paper, they are also institutions that actively recruit, attract and utilise volunteers. However, the impacts of volunteering in zoos and aquariums, on the volunteers themselves, are under-researched. Here we show that, in a survey of more than 500 volunteers at 19 different zoological collections in the UK, zoo volunteers report positive impacts, specifically in relation to increases in their human and social capital. We also found that these benefits were more pronounced in younger volunteers, and with those volunteers who received more initial training. We conclude that while volunteering in UK zoos correlates with significant personal benefits to individuals, zoos could aim higher and should seek to do more to maximise the positive effects of connecting volunteers with the wildlife and nature found in zoo settings, as well as tailoring their volunteer training programmes for different age groups.     

Evaluating a university’s investment in arts programming on student arts participation

ABSTRACT

An individual’s level of education has the strongest relationship with his or her arts participation. What is unclear, however, is why high-educated individuals are more likely to participate in the arts. Economic models indicate that price, income, and background are relevant to attendance, but the role these factors play among high-educated groups, like college students, remains underexplored. This study sheds light on what makes college students more likely to participate in the arts by evaluating a university’s investment in arts programming on campus. We analyse data from an experiment in which a university made substantial investments in arts programming largely centred on increasing access to the arts by providing more free programmes. Using pre- and post-intervention survey data, we analyse changes in students’ reported level of arts participation and barriers to arts involvement. The results from our analyses show that background, such as familiarity and experience in the arts, is the strongest predictor of increased arts participation among college students when prices are reduced.     

Department of Culture,Media and Sport's Peer Review Pilot

April 2009 saw the publication of the documents generated by the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport's museum Peer Review Pilot. This Policy Review offers both an overview of the process and a conceptual critique both of the Peer Review Pilot and the McMaster Review criteria on which the pilot was based. It is argued that the McMaster Review is grounded on a reading of excellence as “life-changing experiences” predicated on an imagined transformative aesthetic moment and that it is only by defining excellence in this way that McMaster could secure peer review as a legitimate means of identifying excellence. When transferred for the purposes of the Peer Review Pilot to the museum sector – with its long traditions of pedagogic and civic reform – this narrow reading of “changing lives” is no longer sustainable. The dislodging of the McMaster grounding assumption within the practice of the Peer Review Pilot creates conceptual fissures that can be traced throughout the Pilot's documentation. Specifically, a reading of the Pilot suggests both a need for a more careful reading of “peer”, a recognition of museums' multiple lines of accountability (including to the public) and the ongoing need for methodologies that might allow for an understanding of “life changing” within a much border frame.     

Know your place? Evaluating the therapeutic benefits of engagement with historic landscapes

This paper emphasises the restorative power of engagement with natural/cultural environments by exploring a body of work that identifies the positive impact of the historic environment on the health and well-being of community archaeology participants. Increasing importance has been ascribed to the role of landscape in public health research and to the environmental factors, which contribute to enhanced quality of life. In reviewing the ways that community archaeology projects are evaluated, and in summarising current practice, we observe that the evidence produced is often anecdotal. However, it is possible to increase robust therapeutic evaluation in ways that might be expected from other disciplinary perspectives and to draw on recent work in the role of the arts in health. This paper highlights that many of those currently engaged in community archaeology are self-selecting, and represent only a small subset of society. The narrow scope of engagement is borne out by Heritage Lottery Fund-commissioned research which found that, whilst volunteering has a significant positive impact on participants, they tend to be white, well-educated and live in the most affluent areas. If historic environment practitioners are to claim therapeutic benefits from their work, then the issue of inequity of access to health benefits is a significant concern for the profession. It is not just a matter of social justice but a concern for the arts and humanities sector, which is currently required to justify its public value [Bate, J. (2011). Public value of the humanities. London: Bloomsbury Academic].     

Globalizing Korean queers? Project L(esbian), the first exhibition of lesbian arts in South Korea

This paper deals with the influence of queer and visual culture in South Korea by concentrating on the example of Project L, the first exhibition organized by self-proclaimed lesbian artists and curators in South Korea in 2005, followed by the group's second exhibition, Gender Spectrum, in 2008. Conflicts between the dominant curatorial approach toward feminist arts and the identity politics of the Project L team are investigated in order to illustrate major theoretical predicaments in which lesbian activists and artists find themselves in feminist organizations and art exhibitions in Korea. As the title “Globalizing Korean Queer” suggests, this paper also examines contradictory circumstances related to the influence of queer theory in non-western countries. A close analysis of Gender Spectrum sheds light upon how a non-western lesbian group utilizes queer theory to understand the distinctive cultural conditions underlying homophobia, beyond merely importing “advanced” theories from the west.     

Introduction

ABSTRACT

This introductory essay identifies the major themes of the special issue, emphasizing both indigenous peoples' anticipation of how imperial modernity hailed them and their determination to work with as well as against it. The mobility, and restlessness, of the actors examined in the essays that follow helped to guarantee this defensive agency and to produce a shared grammar of engagement and resistance across disparate native communities in the nineteenth and twentieth-century worlds they travelled through.     

From Bohemia to Britart – art students over 50 years

In the mid-1980s, Frith and Horne (1987) were describing the experience of British arts schools as, “an anachronism, with students desperately clinging on to attitudes to work and play, which had otherwise vanished” (p. 12). Among these attitudes were the importance of freedom and experimentation in one's work, the status of the artist as an outsider, and the superiority of art over other forms of activity, such as design. Despite huge social changes and contemporary concerns about the “instrumentalization” of arts policy and education (Singerman, 1999; Wilson, 2007), the article argues that the Romantic ideology of the artist is remarkably persistent, and continues to shape graduates' attitudes to their working lives. This in turn feeds into contemporary debates about the nature of cultural labour (Ross, 2003) and the role of the “artistic critique” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005), and, crucially, provides an empirically based view of these debates from the perspective of cultural workers themselves.     

Interrogating the Eyewitness

ABSTRACT

Following on from Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing (2001), this article considers again the potential for collaboration between historians and art historians, and presents ‘ten commandments' to be borne in mind by historians who wish to make use of visual materials in their work.     

A grey literature review of the Cultural Olympiad

This article considers the development of the UK Cultural Olympiad supporting London's successful bid to stage the Olympic Games in 2012. It suggests that the Cultural Olympiad is a complex event itself and needs to be better understood if any impacts are to be felt in a meaningful sense. The event is thus considered through review of over 50 documents relating to its management, in the context of a number of identified themes: cultural development, developing institutional frameworks, social benefit, educational benefit and promotional benefit.     

Facilitating or Impeding Acculturation: A Qualitative Study on Mobile Social Messaging in First-Generation Chinese Immigrants’ Everyday Lives

ABSTRACT

Previous research indicated that communication through media has been intertwined into immigrants’ everyday lives and become an essential part of their acculturating practices. However, no research has been conducted to examine how innovative, ethnic social media play a role in Chinese immigrants’ acculturation process in terms of social capital. In order to fill the research gap, a qualitative study was conducted to explore how Chinese immigrants use social messaging to accumulate social capitals to facilitate their acculturation process. Thirty face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted among Chinese immigrants to collect data. Findings revealed that Chinese immigrants tend to consider acculturation as a complex and long process in which they navigate through and position themselves in the unfamiliar cultural system. The ethnic social medium – WeChat, and in particular, its social messaging plays an essential role in shaping Chinese immigrants’ acculturation experiences by assisting them in garnering both bonding and bridging social capitals.