CMCT 6301: Theoretical Approaches to Cultural Policy

CMCT 6301: Theoretical Approaches to Cultural Policy

COURSE DESCRIPTION

CMCT 6301 3.0 credits

This course of reading provides graduate students with an introduction to theoretical concepts and approaches to the policy dimensions of culture. Theoretical approaches that have shaped critical scholarly discourse on cultural policy are studied, drawn from disciplines of social science and the humanities. The course of reading will examine the origins, development and paradigmatic shifts within cultural policy studies and its relationship to cultural studies. Key theoretical perspectives on cultural policy and on the study of policy will be presented, particularly the tension between conceptual and applied perspectives. We consider how policy perspectives contribute to the analysis of culture—whether the arts, ways of life or cultural heritage, as well as visions of ‘community’ and citizenship—and how the management of culture operates as a form of power under conditions of neoliberalism and how globalization has transformed the way we understand cultural policy and provoked its ‘transnationalisation.’

 

 

Course Number: CMCT6301
Field: Communication & Culture
School: York University
Date Published: May 6, 2013