Beyond resilience: learning from the cultural economy

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper has been to address the apparent paradox that culture has been the high-profile victim of funding cuts in the period of austerity; at the same time, culture has prospered. Is culture then the ‘poster child for resilience’? The paper seeks to de-couple the notion from neo-liberalism and austerity. It counters with an argument that resilience as a concept is relational, it does not have a unitary meaning and its forms will change depending on context (that is, the cultural field and the field of governance). Hence, the strange survival of culture is explained not by austerity, but by the dynamism of the cultural field. However, this disjunction between governance and culture also carried a number of risks and problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Austerity
• neo-liberalism
• cultural economy
• policy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.