The Cities of Culture Research Network: Turning Evaluation into Policy, brings together representatives of all Cities or Capitals of Culture research and evaluation programmes that have taken place in the UK. Cultural mega-events like the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) and the UK City of Culture (UKCoC) can be effective as catalysts and accelerators for culture-led urban regeneration strategies, through a focused and intensive programme of cultural activities. There are many evaluation studies about the impacts of City of Culture programmes, but they do not explore their medium and long-term effects on a shared UK-wide basis. Furthermore, they are not systematically used for policy development, which is a central issue that this project aims to explore. The proposed research network creates an interdisciplinary space where academics, postgraduate researchers and local, national and international policy makers can pursue a better collective understanding of the Cities of Culture initiative, whilst specifically exploring the conditions and procedures required to create productive links between evaluation and new policy development. The network includes all (European) Capitals, (UK) Cities and (London) Boroughs of Culture projects delivered by cities within the UK. The network will also connect UK researchers with their European counterparts in Aarhus (Denmark) and Galway (Ireland), allowing the network to benefit from insights into culture-led regeneration practices elsewhere in Europe. Network membership will consist of a core group of researchers, evaluation professionals and national and international policy representatives, along with an associate group consisting of academics, local policy makers and other interested bodies. The project will also establish a forum for postgraduate scholars researching the Cities of Culture initiative within partner universities and beyond. The network programme consists of three events. The first is a colloquium, bringing together all network groups to identify challenges, barriers and opportunities for turning collective Cities of Culture research evidence into policy. The second is a two-day specialist workshop where the core group will examine issues raised in greater depth. In the final colloquium, attended by all groups, the outcomes of all events will be examined, leading to the production of key recommendations for effective knowledge exchange between City of Culture researchers and policy makers in the future. The project will result in a website, three summary reports and one key recommendations document. Outcomes will be disseminated via the website and through the professional and academic networks of project members. The outcomes of the network will also be published in a professional magazine, such as Local Government Association First and as an academic paper in a leading cultural policy journal such as the International Journal of Cultural Policy or Cultural Trends.

The UK's arts & cultural sector is thriving: it contributes 674,000 jobs and £11.8bn per annum to the economy and remains one of its fastest growing sectors (DCMS, 2018). Yet despite this strong economic performance and its world-leading reputation for quality, the sector consistently fails to comprehend, capture and convey its values in a compelling way. This is partly because it suffers from structural problems including a lack of diversity, skills gaps (especially in data analysis & digital engagement), poor research & evaluation skills, and significant under-investment in training and R&D. These issues hinder its innovation and resilience and compromise its ability to make a coherent and compelling case for investment to key stakeholders, including private donors, corporate sponsors and HM Treasury, and to cognate sectors such as health & education. So we will dedicate resources to training/developing sector practitioners and students (FE/HE/PGR) in key areas of need including data analysis, audience/participant research, research-driven evaluation and storytelling. This proposal has been conceived by a genuinely national consortium comprising world-leading universities & sector partners. These partnerships will enable the Centre to quickly tap into existing networks and gain ready access to different types & sizes of arts/cultural organisations from all over the UK. The Centre will be delivered in a collaborative way that draws on the complementary expertise of its core & affiliate members and harnesses this in a strategic way to maximise the potential of its activities. Based partly on the findings of the Cultural Value Project, the Centre's priority themes will comprise: diversity & inequality, public impact, health & wellbeing, place-making, culture-led regeneration, civic engagement, cultural democracy, co-creation & participation. These themes will be prioritized in our calls for £200k seed funding and reflected in our events. The aim of the events is to stimulate fresh thinking on key themes related to cultural value & engagement and communicate this beyond the sector. The Centre will deliver the following 20 knowledge exchange events over 5 years: 1. Scoping Event 1 (Creative workshop, Opera North/DARE, Leeds) 2. Scoping Event 2 (Open Space event, British Library, London) 3. Launch (Leeds Town Hall) 4. Arts impact evaluation (Creative workshop, U. of Liverpool) 5. Cultural & economic value (Symposium, Cardiff University) 6. Arts, wellbeing & health policy (Colloquium, U. of Leeds) 7. Cultures of participation & co-production (Creative workshop, QMU, Edinburgh) 8. Diversity Forum (Coventry 2021) 9. Audience research & empirical aesthetics (Participatory Action Research event, UCL) 10. Cultures of fandom (Symposium, U. of Bristol) 11. Creative industries, innovation & the creative economy (Symposium, U. of York) 12. Place-making, culture-led regeneration & evaluation (Symposium, U. of Hull) 13. Barriers to cultural engagement (Open Space event, U. of Sheffield) 14. Arts & education policy (Creative workshop, National Theatre/British Library, London) 15. Processes of cultural value (Creative workshop, Eden Court/U. of Highlands & Islands, Inverness) 16. Cultural taste & class (Symposium, U. of Warwick) 17. Arts and conflict resolution (Symposium, Queens University Belfast) 18. Festival & storytelling symposium (Opera North/Leeds 2023, Leeds) 19. Conference on Cultural Value and Engagement (UoL) 20. Evaluation & legacy planning roundtable (UoL) These events will be supported by our website, which will encourage and facilitate engagement & debate between and beyond the events. Outcomes will be captured via regular research digests & blogs. In order to remain open to stakeholders' input and responsive to emerging issues, the Centre will earmark additional funding to support & partner fringe events that arise during the scoping events and over the lifecycle of the Centre.

The Creative Industries Sector Deal positions the Creative Industries as a central part of the UK economy in the imminent post-Brexit period, with major implications for its role not simply economically, but also socially and culturally. It also recognises that the Creative Industries are sites of inequality, although questions are raised about whether this is primarily to do with messaging, in which people from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds simply don't know enough about what working in the Creative Industries can offer them. Understanding and Challenging Inequality in Culture (UCIC) aims to directly address issues raised in the Industrial Strategy and in the Creative Industries Sector Deal. It builds on several previous AHRC-funded projects in order to understand the contemporary dynamics of inequality in culture, addressing both cultural labour and participation, through the analysis of existing data with the potential to shed light on inequalities in areas that have not had a major focus so far. It does so through five central research questions, coproduction with key actors in the Creative Industries throughout, and a plan for impact through which inequalities in culture can be meaningfully challenged. It uses existing data throughout, in order to make the most of the UK's strong data resources around culture, both datasets designed for academic analysis, and data originally collected for other reasons which can be analysed to answer questions about inequality in culture. The five questions are: 1. How can members of underrepresented groups access work in the creative industries? How successful are current approaches to challenging inequalities? 2. How far do boards of directors, and of trustees, reflect and reinforce existing inequalities in the creative industries? 3. Do snapshots of inequality in culture conceal high levels of year-on-year change in participation, both within and across forms? 4. How does understanding cultural participation as a network inform our understanding of inequality in culture? 5. How similar are the dynamics of inequality in the creative industries in the UK to those of a salient international comparator? These questions have been chosen in order to work across different parts of the Creative Industries: RQ1 involves analysis of access to work in the Creative Industries, which have historically mainly been answered using qualitative methods; RQ2 involves systematic analysis of the most senior levels of organisations in the Creative Industries, above even workforce level; RQ3 involves the analysis of changes in cultural participation, rather than merely differences, to understand the persistence and volatility of inequality in cultural participation; RQ4 involves the analysis of participation at the organisational rather than individual level, and RQ5 puts inequality in culture in the UK into an international context. Through answering these questions, issues of inequality will be raised at different levels across the Creative Industries, in order that the questions raised in the Creative Industries Sector Deal can be comprehensively addressed and action taken. UCIC will answer these questions in collaboration with two key organisations in the Creative Industries, who are positioned to effectively challenge the sector and work alongside organisations within to make changes.

The professional music world, specifically that of Western classical music, tends to be white and male, and most certainly: it does not include many disabled musicians. Even recently (March'17), Joshua Kosman (The San Francisco Chronicle's music critic) wrote 'Classical so white and male: Time is overdue for diversity', urging orchestras world-wide to become more inclusive and to address the lack of ethnic and gender diversity among performers. Kosman had examined schedules of orchestras and found that in the San Francisco Symphony's 2017-18 season with music by more than 50 composers only one female composer was featured. Kosman does not even talk of the need to include disabled composers or performers ! It is timely to rethink attitudes towards inclusion and disability in Western Classical music performance. Our research team wants to understand the issues that disabled young musicians face, and by designing immersive music performance experiences for abled and disabled musicians we allow for an interchange of ideas and performance experiences. More research is needed to establish the best design criteria and methods for immersive environments that would enable, for example, a wheelchair bound pianist to experience being an 'able-bodied' performer. There are many talented young musicians who play instruments to a professional standard but, due to a disability, do not feel that a professional music career is an option for them. Disabilities (i.e. deafness, or hypochondroplasia, a form of short-limbed dwarfism) do not preclude people from becoming musicians. It does, however, mean that these musicians approach their instrument and learning of music in different ways (the deaf musician learning through body sensations; a musician with hypochondroplasia having to alter instrumental positioning). The profoundly deaf percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, female and disabled, is a rare exception in the world of classical music and a great inspiration for many aspiring, disabled young musicians. While other arts fields attempt to widen their activities (Northern Ireland's Replay Theatre: www.replaytheatreco.org/theadventurecollective is an outstanding example for making inclusive shows for people with profound and multiple learning difficulties), the music world tends to lag behind. Our research team will explore some issues that disabled young musicians face. At the start of the project our Drake Music partner, with over 25 years' experience in the area of music and disability, will identify 3 physically disabled musicians who want to collaborate with 3 able-bodied professional musicians, selected from Hard Rain Soloist Ensemble (HRSE), Belfast's only contemporary music ensemble. HRSE is known for their visionary programming, musical flexibility and inclusive ethos. For this proposal, we will not work with severe mental disability as this would require a larger scope and different support system. Our technical partner, immersive content designer BeAnotherLab, will develop, through participatory design methods, immersive technologies that allow disabled and able-bodied musicians to experience the reality of another. Throughout two intense workshop phases, disabled musicians experience work in a professional music setting, while able-bodied musicians experience what it means to be a disabled musician. By co-creating immersive experiences, through the use of for example Virtual Reality (VR), we put disabled musicians at the foreground, driving the development of the immersive experiences. Our aim is to allow for an exchange of disabled and able-bodied musicians and for the wider public to experience the social exclusions that disabled musicians face in our society. The final showcase will be a combination of a concert, an immersive experience installation, and a public debate about the research, design processes, prototypes, and about the potentials for future audiences and developments in the performing arts.

The creative economy is often celebrated for its contribution to the economy, in the form of job creation, the night-time economy, cultural tourism, and intellectual property. It contributes to policy and practice in terms of urban regeneration, education, and soft power diplomacy, as well as quality of life and life satisfaction. It is feted as being a driver for social mobility, and for the progressiveness and belief in meritocracy of the workforce. However, research has also revealed the significant exclusions from this picture: the creative workforce demonstrates substantial inequalities in terms of social class origin, gender and ethnicity. Moreover, existing research has demonstrated the low chances people from working class origins have of entering the creative economy workforce did not change significantly between 1981 and 2011, despite huge changes in the social structure of English society. Cultural consumption too is strongly stratified according to social class and ethnic group. The lack of representativeness amongst those that that create and commission of culture is the subject of sustained debate in public, policy and industry circles. There are also important inequalities in the geographical distribution of cultural investments. This research builds on recent AHRC-funded projects to explore each of these dimensions of exclusions from the creative economy in turn, in three linked work packages: - Work package one will explore the relationship of audience members from Black and Minority (BAME) ethnic groups to the programming of cultural institutions, how they feel that their culture is represented by these institutions, and how this relates to their cultural lives overall. I will analyse how this interacts with their own social class and education, traditional predictors of cultural participation. - Work package two will explore how cultural consumption is contextualised by the places that people live in, by analysing the cultural participation of those that relocate: how does moving to an area with more or fewer cultural services, or other measures of cultural intensity, affect the cultural lives that people report? How does this relate to the factors that we know affect whether people being report being culturally engaged, such as education and being taken as a child? Previous research found that those with lower probability of attending a venue are more negatively affected by a lack of local opportunities to do so. - Work package three will develop a more nuanced understanding of how social mobility into creative employment varies geographically, comparing Scotland to England and those raised outside London to those who grew up in the capital. In addition I will look for explanations of the high rates of people leaving the creative workforce, to better understand the barriers to maintaining a career in the creative economy. This fellowship builds on successful previous work with The Audience Agency, a creative sector support organisation that is at the centre of research into the relationships between audiences and venues. It partners with a new independent research organisation, the Centre for Towns, which offers academic research and analysis in support of the viability and prosperity of towns across the UK. Each partner organisation will contribute to the research design stage (focusing on work packages 1 and 2, respectively), will offer advice on protocols and operationalisation, access to data that they have developed, and a platform for dissemination and impact through inclusion of the research in at least one event, and will publish a public-facing report which summarises the research findings. The Audience Agency will in addition offer advice on and access to networks for recruiting participating venues for the audience research.