The art of “everyday resistance”: Small city cultural actors’ disruption of extralocal growth politics

ABSTRACT

In a policymaking climate characterized by the devolution of responsibilities from the state to local level and the decrease in state funding of municipal projects, state and local actors across the U.S. turn to culture as a revenue-generating strategy. Positioning the cultural field in this role means that new actors and logics govern the field, making for tensions between multiple levels of cultural landscaping. We know a great deal about how large cities navigate tensions emerging from growth politics, but little about how groups in small cities receive and use formal, state-initiated cultural development programs. To understand small-city power relations and arts-oriented development, I draw on James C. Scott’s theory of “everyday resistance.” An analysis of fieldnotes and in-depth interviews with local cultural actors in two small-city cultural districts illustrates the “everyday resistance” they use to navigate tensions. This paper uncovers the nuanced strategies small-city cultural actors use to disrupt growth politics, at times, harmonizing with extralocal agendas, but also modifying and circumventing them to meet community needs.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural development
• small cities
• organizations

Acknowledgments

I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Jonathan R. Wynn, Kathryne M. Young, and Ellen J. Pader for their generous feedback on previous drafts of this paper, and to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See here for cultural district designation guidelines: https://massculturalcouncil.org/communities/cultural-districts/application-process/

2. To ensure confidentiality, I use these pseudonyms to refer to the two cities.

3. The U.S. Department of Agriculture defines an urban county as a county in metro areas of 250,000 to 1 million population.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer L. Garfield-Abrams

Jennifer L. Garfield-Abrams is a graduate student in the Sociology Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She uses qualitative and visual methods to study cities, culture, and identity construction. Her dissertation, supported by the UMass Graduate School, investigates how longtime residents and newcomers to a small Hudson Valley city draw on distinct ideas about the city to construct their identities that inform community responses to exogenous and endogenous shocks like pandemic-driven metropolis-to-small city migration.