Cultural Ecology and Cultural Critique
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Huddersfield
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 17
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.3390/arts8040166
- Title of journal
- Arts
- Article number
- 166
- First page
- -
- Volume
- 8
- Issue
- 4
- ISSN
- 2076-0752
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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3
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This article considers the pairing of two conceptual formations ‘cultural ecology’ and ‘cultural critique’ to critically renegotiate the use of the terms ‘ecology’, ‘ecosystem’, ‘placemaking’ and ‘network’ within cultural policy and academic discourse. With reference to a body of situated knowledges, derived from place studies to eco-regionalisms, urban to art criticisms, it considers the operant concept of ‘environing’ as the condition of possibility for the space of critique. With the aid of several distinct and specific examples, including the artist-activist movement MACAO, the work of T J Demos, Ursula Biemann and Paolo Tavares through the Center for Creative Ecologies, University of California, Santa Cruz, Jeremy Deller’s documentary Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain (2019) and Temporary Contemporary (a live action research initiative in Huddersfield, Yorkshire), the article shows how value judgments and the conditions for critiquing value-determinants may be re-negotiated in and through acts of ‘environing’ as part of an ecological approach to culture for our times. This includes necessary and strategic actions where mixed ecologies of cultural activity work against the disciplinary policing of space with new assemblages of distributed power. This peer-reviewed article features in a guest-edited issue (Dr Stephen Moonie, Newcastle University) entitled ‘The State(s) of Criticism’. The volume sought to re-engage with James Elkin’s and Michael Newman’s The State of Art Criticism, first published in 2007, to consider how notions of judgment, voice and critique are situated in a current global, cultural and political climate, including the knowledges ‘criticism’ might produce in these contexts. This is multiple authored publication –order of writing –Rowan Bailey, Claire Booth-Kurpnieks, Kath Davies, Ioanni Delsante. Dr Bailey provided the framing, structure and theorisation of the article, as well as bringing insights from being a lead in the action research team that produces Temporary Contemporary.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -