Rethinking Local Government Support for Youth Arts:The Case of NOISE South Dublin

Within Ireland, interest in strategically supporting young people’s participation in the arts has increased. Additionally, awareness of the Internet’s potential for promot- ing engagement with the arts has grown. Addressing national directives and local needs assessments, South Dublin County Council’s Arts Office initiated NOISE South Dublin (http://www.noisesouthdublin.com), an interactive Web site based on Australia Council’s NOISE project (http://www.noise.net), to promote the creative development of young people in the county. This article presents the practical chal- lenges and potential of youth arts Web-based programs for harnessing the creative engagement of youth. It concludes that the Internet is only useful if it expands online engagement offline.

Business Giving, the Tsunami and Corporates as Rock Stars: Some Implications for Arts Funding?

Financial and cultural aspects of corporate giving by UK and non-UK companies in response to the December 2004 South Asia Tsunami disaster are explored in this article. Literatures on corporate giving rationales, concepts of disaster and donor activity in disasters provide an underpinning. The article seeks to make connections between this high profile if short-lived business giving and the funding of the arts that is sought from business; and to draw tentative lessons for arts funding when seeking business support. The giving accounts in the wake of the Tsunami from a non-probability sample of 56 UK companies and 16 non-UK companies were examined. Reported online to the UK charity Business in the Community, these accounts were accessed in February 2005 and scrutinized thematically. Concurrently, company financial profiles to accompany giving figures were constructed. Although linkages between donation levels and financial performance were lacking, emerging themes included the role of employees, influencing company giving and creating a climate of expectation of firms' contributions. These developments may have important implications for business funding for the arts, where leading philanthropists are prominent as individuals in the giving landscapes; but employees' collective involvement is not marked. Alternatively, cultivation of employees as would-be donors, indirectly via their firms, may be a more secure, if lower level route to funding for some arts organizations than dependence on high profile business leaders. The article considers alternative scenarios for company giving in disaster contexts, including as a sustained and lasting giving theme or as company support as a ‘one-off’ event, rock-star style. The likely development of employee power as a key element in company giving is explored; and its wider meanings for funding in arts settings, (where the giver as rock star heroine/hero is also prominent) are considered.

Politics without the Vernacular: Liberal Culturalism and the Language Policy of the European Union

Will Kymlicka's liberal culturalism presents a tension between the idea that linguistic diversity in multilingual polities should be protected and the claim that democratic debate across linguistic boundaries is unfeasible. In this article, I resolve that tension by arguing that trans-lingual democratic deliberation in multilingual polities is necessary to legitimise those measures aimed at the protection of linguistic diversity. I conclude that my account provides a coherent normative response to the challenges faced by the European Union (EU) in the field of language policy and that an EU-wide deliberative forum is not as unfeasible as Kymlicka suggests.

Resistance is Feral: Digital Culture, Community Arts, and the New Cultural Gatekeepers

The Community Arts sector in Australia has a history of resistance. It has challenged hegemonic culture through facilitating grassroots creative production, contesting notions of artistic processes, and the role of the artist in society. This paper examines this penchant for resistance through the lens of contemporary digital culture, to establish that the sector is continuing to challenge dominant forms of cultural control. It then proposes that this enthusiasm and activity lacks ethical direction, describing it as feral to encompass the potential of current practices, while highlighting how a level of taming is needed in order to develop ethical approaches.

Visualising Invisible Networks as Collaborative Arts Practice

This paper examines approaches to the visualisation of ‘invisible’ communications networks. It situates network visualisation as a critical design exercise, and explores how community artists might use such a practice to develop telematic art projects – works that use communications networks as their medium. The paper’s hypotheses are grounded in the Australian community media arts field, but could be applied to other collaborative contexts.

Community Arts and Appropriate Internet Technology: Participation, Materiality, and the Ethics of Sustainability in the Digitally Networked Era

This thesis establishes appropriate internet technology as a matter of sustainability for the community arts field. It begins with a contextual review that historicises community art in relation to technological, cultural, and political change. It goes on to identify key challenges for the field resulting from the emerging socio-cultural significance of the internet and digital media technologies. A conceptual review of the literature positions these issues in relation to Internet Studies, integrating key concepts from Software Studies and the computational turn with approaches from the fields of ICT for Development (ICT4D), Critical Design, and Critical Making. Grounded in these intersecting literatures the thesis offers a new pragmatic ethics of appropriate internet technology: one involving an alternative philosophical platform from which suitable internet-based technologies can be designed and assembled by practitioners. I interrogate these ideas through an in-depth investigation of CuriousWorks, an Australian community arts organisation, focusing on their current internet practices. The thesis then reflects on some experimental interventions I designed as part of the study for the purpose of provoking shifts in the field of community arts. The research findings form the foundation of a series of recommendations offered to practitioners and policy makers that may guide their critical and creative uses of internet technologies in the future.

Voyage(s) to Sarajevo: Jean-Luc Godard and the Image of War

This essay discusses Jean-Luc Godard’s artistic response to the Bosnian War (1992-95), and its representations in the Western mass media. For Godard, the reluctance of Europe’s advanced liberal democracies to intervene meaningfully in Bosnia – their insistence that 'humanitarianism' rather than protective intervention was the order of the day – was tantamount to supporting Serbian fascism, and – a fortiori – regressing to a policy of appeasement reminiscent of the days of the Munich Agreement. Although Godard's stance set him against some of his former compatriots on the left, speculating on his ideological motivations is beside the point. Rather, it is is in his filmmaking, in his vision of cinema, and how it relates to other histories of the image, that Godard’s sensibility can be most keenly felt and understood. As the essay points out, even his recent contribution to Jean-Michel Frodon's compilation film, Bridges of Sarajevo/Les ponts de Sarajevo (2014, 114 mn.), persists in posing questions about how the past continues to shape the present, and how Sarajevo and its contemporary history still delineates the identity of Europe. 

Unpacking the Roma Participation Puzzle: Presence, Voice and Influence

The idea that Roma communities need to be included in public life is rather uncontroversial, widely accepted by Roma activists, academics and policy-makers in national and transnational political contexts. But, what do we mean by participation? Are we talking about formal political structures or do we refer to the capacity of ordinary Roma to have a presence in public life? The right to participation for minorities is specified by international norms but is interpreted differently in national contexts. Nevertheless, participation alone is not enough, thus minorities require 'effective' participation given that the utilitarian principles of liberal democracy means that groups such as Roma will always be outvoted. This article is based on the conviction that addressing the multiple and inter-connected issues facing Roma communities across Europe requires the participation of Roma in social, economic and political life. Whilst the article acknowledges the structural barriers which inhibit attempts to foster the integration of Roma communities, it does consider different conceptions of political participation including presence, voice and influence and how these are understood by the European Union and its member states with regards to Roma.