**Apologies for cross-posting**
CFP: Cultural Trends Special Double Issue May/July 2019
Working
title: Audience Data and Research: Perspectives from Scholarship, Policy, Management and Practice
Edited
by: Dr Ben Walmsley (University of Leeds, UK), Dr Katya Johanson (Deakin University, Melbourne) and Dr Steven Hadley (University of Sheffield, UK).
At
a time of increasing audience mobility and greater competition for audience attention, the need to understand audiences in a deeper and richer way is at the forefront of concerns for funding agencies, policymakers and arts organisations, and increasingly for
scholars. In this context, this double issue aims to stimulate new critical debate on the potential of emerging audience research methods and approaches to provide fresh insights into questions of experiential enrichment and cultural value.
Despite
the vital role that audiences play across the globe in supporting and giving meaning to the performing arts, audience research remains sporadic; limited by methodological insecurity; and compromised by claims of positive bias
(Johanson
and Glow, 2015). Scholars in social science disciplines, such as business and management studies, and in arts and humanities disciplines, such as performance and cultural studies, struggle equally to make headway on seemingly intractable issues of cultural
engagement, decoding, meaning-making, value and impact. As
the next generation of arts audiences matures and as drivers including big data, co-creation, participation, digital engagement and live streaming continue to impact on the arts, audience behavior and expectations are changing. Audience research needs to change
in response.
The
proposed special issue will: provide a forum to showcase and bring together the highest quality contributions of, between and beyond these respective disciplines to explore the potential complementarity of evolving approaches to audience research; and provide
an in-depth opportunity for investigating evolving methods. It will also situate, contextualise and showcase the emerging academic field of audience studies. As such, part of this special issue will critically explore a range of empirical approaches, methods
and methodologies to highlight new research across the many disciplines that contribute to audience scholarship.
A
second focus of the issue is on the contribution that the use of a specific dataset – Audience Finder[1]
– makes now (and might make in the future) to our knowledge of audiences, the audience development strategies of cultural organisations and the policy development of public funders and regulatory bodies. A variety of fields have started critically examining
what van Dijck (2014) has termed dataism, and the logic and consequences of big data in contemporary societies. The evolving dataset within Audience Finder is currently
analysed to reveal patterns, trends, and associations
but questions remain as to how the data generated might transform social, cultural, political and economic processes in the (subsidized and commercial) arts sector.
This
element of the call provides an opportunity for those working both within and outside of the cultural sector to use analytical tools and methods from other fields to provide new insight and understanding on current patterns of cultural consumption. To enable
researcher engagement with the Audience Finder dataset and the staff team at The Audience Agency (offices in London and Manchester), a small number of bursaries (max. £500 per paper) will be available to cover travel and other expenses.
Invited
submissions will be subject to rigorous double blind peer review and should broadly address one or more of the following themes:
Publication
timeline
First drafts in:
Friday 14th December 2018
Peer reviews due in and sent to
authors: Friday 22nd February 2019
Revised drafts to editor:
Friday 5th April 2019
Online publication date:
Friday 31st May 2019
Print publication date:
Thursday 6th June 2019
For proposals related to approaches
to audience research please contact:
Dr Ben Walmsley
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For proposals related to analysis
of the Audience Finder dataset please contact:
Dr Steven Hadley
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[1] Audience Finder (https://www.theaudienceagency.org/audience-finder) is the free national audience data and development tool, enabling cultural organisations to understand, compare and apply audience insight. Audience Finder brings together data on all UK households with data from over 800 cultural organisations: over 170 million tickets, 59 million transactions, approximately 280,000 surveys and web analytics from all the UK's major arts and cultural organisations.
www.theaudienceagency.org
The free national audience data and development tool.
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