Description
Is Culture Bad for You?Culture will keep you fit and healthy. Culture will bring communities together. Culture will improve your education. This is the message from governments and arts organisations. But this event will highlight the need to be cautious about culture.
Dr. Mark Taylor is located in the Sheffield Methods Institute of the University of Sheffield. He is one of the authors of Culture Is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries. In this talk, he discussed some of the ways in which culture is unequal, and the ways that culture reinforces inequalities. Starting with unequal access to cultural events, unequal cultural childhoods are followed by inequalities in the cultural workforce: White men from middle-class backgrounds are the most likely to get cultural jobs. But the inequalities don’t stop once people are already in work, with people from marginalized groups more likely to have negative experiences and less likely to be promoted.
This talk presented the key findings from the book, focusing on the question of how these inequalities have persisted over time in spite of efforts to make access to culture more equal. Drawing on extensive survey work and more than 200 interviews with cultural workers, it demonstrates the varied pathways through which the most privileged people have been able to ensure that the cultural sector is most welcoming to people who look and sound like themselves. It also addressed how these same people use the language of inequalities to reinforce their own positions.
| Period | 23 Mar 2023 |
|---|---|
| Visiting from | University of Sheffield (United Kingdom) |
| Visitor degree | PhD |
| Degree of Recognition | National |
Keywords
- inequality
- cultural labour
- cultural industries