Dear Colleagues

The Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King's College London has the pleasure of hosting the following research seminar on Wednesday 8 March at 4pm. All welcome.

Cultural policy studies and ‘computation’: understanding the infrastructures of taste and participation

Dr. David Wright, Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of Warwick

16.00-17.30hrs, 8 March 2017, Strand S -1.27

Like other disciplines within the humanities and social sciences, cultural policy studies has had to respond to the influence of computing technologies on its certainties and practices. Research in this field has explored the changes wrought to the management of cultural organisations, to the models of the creative industries and to new forms of access and participation to culture and the arts. In this paper I suggest that these emphases might miss how computing technologies are re-shaping the project of cultural policy in a more fundamental direction. The paper draws on the work of David Golumbia on ‘computationalism’ (Golumbia, 2009) to encourage attention on the cultural values of computing technologies. These values, of instrumental reason, categorisation and calculation underpin a range of technologies, which are increasingly present in and important to the management of everyday life and cultural practice. Reflecting on how cultural taste and participation are being re-shaped by computing technologies, the paper argues these new ‘infrastructures’ are informed by new visions of the kinds of people who live with and through them and the kinds of institutions and structures through which such people can be governed. In this paper I argue that the historical concerns of cultural policy studies - about how states are concerned with the cultural formation of their citizens or subjects – are keenly present in the strategic ambitions and imperatives of computational cultures.

Biography David Wright is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Cultural Policy Studies at the University of Warwick. His research interests are in the sociology of culture, popular culture, the cultural industries and cultural taste. Before joining Warwick he worked at the Centre for Research into Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at the Open University, where he was a member of a team of researchers conducting research into British tastes, published as Culture, Class Distinction (Routledge, 2009). His most recent book is Understanding Cultural Taste (Palgrave, 2015).