Artists’ Narratives in Cultural Policy and Management Research

Artists shape policy and management processes integral to their career development and to their practice. As the main art producers, they are considered as decisive participants in artistic terms, but they remain side-lined in policymaking, and underrepresented in the arts management discourse. This special issue will examine artists’ individual and collective agency in cultural policy and management processes, bringing together two distinctive strands. First, it will foreground artist-led developments and their associated narratives and secondly question what cultural policies and management responsibilities and positions stand for when ‘giving’ artists a platform to be heard and to enact. It will operationalise its critique through a diversity of research methodologies and philosophies and envisages a broad geographical scope in its discussions. This collection will address and bring together two cultural policy and management blind spots: marginalisation of artists and the lack of diversity in methodologies.

The special issue explores the following questions:

• In what ways are artists involved in developing/creating the policies that affect their lives and careers, both individually and in collaboration with others?
• How do we define artists as the creators of their own policies through the management of their practice? And what does this mean for them and the policies that affect them?
• What is the role of the researcher as the interpreter, translator, or developer of policies that come from artist-focussed research?

Contributions on these and other relevant questions are invited – in the form of research articles, essays, and case studies – from scholars in a range of fields, including those who work across sectors and disciplines, or who themselves bring a dual artist/researcher perspective to their work.