Title: Approaching Cultural Value as a Complex System: Experiencing the Arts and Articulating the City in Leeds
Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council

Abstract: This research project aims to propose answers to what is a notoriously difficult question: what, exactly, makes a cultural or artistic experience valuable? Such a question invites others that add detail and complexity: in what ways does any idea of value connected to the experience differ for those involved - the audience member, performer, or organisation hosting the event? Does a 'successful' experience mean the same thing for everyone who participates? How do individuals and institutions understand and express the value of the cultural/artistic engagement? And what are the best ways of seeking to capture the experience and the value it contains? We will address these questions through a wide-ranging participatory action research programme that looks at a variety of participants in cultural and arts in the city of Leeds, and in so doing we will add another question to those mentioned above, namely: in what ways does a vibrant cultural life provide value in a major urban centre? The project will utilise existing research connections between the University and several partner organisations, large and small, in the city - Opera North, Northern Ballet, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Yorkshire Dance, South Asian Arts, Thackray Medical Museum, Artlink West Yorkshire, Unlimited Theatre, Heads Together - as well as working with the NHS, Leeds City Council and Arts Council England. Our research will use a combination of methods and approaches, and incorporate both range and specific focus. To begin, we will ask each of our partner organisations how they understand the value of the culture they produce and showcase, and what experience they think is created as a result. Bringing these partner organisations together to discuss this is a major part of the project, and an early workshop will facilitate this dialogue and exchange, which will be vital for the design of the next research phase. Following this, the project will focus on a single event - the month-long annual LoveArts Festival that focuses on disseminating NHS policy on good mental health and wellbeing - in order to track how questions of cultural value emerge and are experienced. The research team, which possesses expertise across a range of disciplines, from audience participation research and cultural policy to narrative representations of mental health, will work with Festival staff and those attending events to map, through interviews and participant observation, the different ways in which LoveArts works. In so doing, we will be seeking to both gauge the ways in which mental wellbeing is communicated and understood through artistic experiences, and chart how a cultural festival establishes the parameters (in terms of organisation, performance, audience recruitment etc.) that seek to make this happen. In turn, we will explore how the concentrated urban space of Leeds facilitates these processes, producing a city-specific experience of the arts and questions of mental health. A final project workshop will return to the broad view. We will take the results of our analysis and conversations back to our full range of partners in order to share the conclusions and showcase how the work undertaken with LoveArts, added to the initial sector-wide exchange, can help provide a framework for the evaluation of the cultural/artistic experience in Leeds, understood as a broad category that includes individual reflection, commercial demands, and community cohesion. Our intention is is twofold: to suggest to arts organisations, the NHS and Leeds City Council what a conceptual model of an experience of cultural value in Leeds might be; and to produce fine-grained research, differentiated to meet the complexity of our subject matter, that can capture this.


Research activity codes: 1.2 PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIOECONOMIC PROCESSES
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE