Browsing by Person "Jancovich, Leila"

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Cultural participation: Stories of success, histories of failure [Editorial]
(2020-09-01) Jancovich, Leila; Stevenson, David
This editorial introduces a special edition of Conjunctions that explores how cultural participation policies, projects, and practices could be improved through recognising the pervasiveness of past failures. It introduces current policy debates on cultural participation and posits that the dominant focus on ‘cultural deficits’ and ‘non-participants’ rather than on how activities are currently funded has resulted in a failure to increase the number and diversity of people participating in state subsidised cultural activities. It further suggests that a culture of evaluating success, rather than critically reflecting on failure, results in cultural participation policies and projects that replicate past failures and maintain an inequitable status quo. This special edition attempts to challenge existing narratives of unqualified success by offering alternative narratives that consider failure from different perspectives and at different points in the design and implementation of cultural participation policies and projects. In doing so it highlights the extent to which success and failure coexist and the richness of insight that comes from considering both. This matters because it is only such open and honest critical reflection that has the potential to facilitate the social learning needed for those who can exert the most power in the cultural sector to acknowledge the extent of the structural change required for cultural participation to be supported more equitably.
Cultural Policy is Local: Understanding Cultural Policy as Situated Practice
(Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2023-08-27) Durrer, Victoria; Gilmore, Abigail; Jancovich, Leila; Stevenson, David; Durrer, Victoria; Gilmore, Abigail; Jancovich, Leila; Stevenson, David
This Open Access edited collection calls for a greater understanding of ‘the local’ within the ways the arts, culture and creative practices are governed, promoted, regulated, resourced and valued. Cultural policy studies tends to privilege the national (and international) as the primary site at which cultural policy is enacted, and focuses on the ‘local’ as a case study of practice, rather than a site of policy in its own right. While this may make global policy transfer manageable for national policy agencies, it ignores the contingent relationships, diverse geographies and distinct identities of localities. This volume addresses this gap and is structured around three themes: disciplining the local, which examines key concepts from different academic fields of study; managing the local, which identifies policy approaches that engage with the idea of ‘the local’ in different ways; and practising the local, which offers case studies of how ‘local’ cultural policies are being enacted in places of differing scale and geography.
Failure seems to be the hardest word to say
(Taylor & Francis, 2021-02-24) Jancovich, Leila; Stevenson, David
Policy interventions, to increase participation, have long been informed by data demonstrating inequity in the subsidised cultural sector. However, it is less clear how evidence is employed to judge success or failure of initiatives to create greater equity. Indeed, quantitative surveys suggest a failure to change patterns of cultural participation. Despite this a large body of evaluation reports celebrate the ‘success’ of participatory projects. This article presents findings from UK research that explores how cultural participation policies might be improved by better acknowledgment of failures. The research involved interviews, questionnaires, workshops, observations and documentary analysis involving over 200 policymakers, cultural practitioners, and participants. It identified a cultural policy landscape that is not conducive to honesty or critical reflection and argues that without this it will persistently fail to learn or to deliver the scale of change required to create the equity it professes to desire.
Failures in Cultural Participation
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022-12-08) Jancovich, Leila; Stevenson, David
This open access book examines how and why the UK's approach towards increasing cultural participation has largely failed to address inequality and inequity in the subsidised cultural sector despite long-standing international policy discourse on this issue. It further examines why meaningful change in cultural policy has not been more forthcoming in the face of this apparent failure. This work examines how a culture of mistrust, blame, and fear between policymakers, practitioners, and participants has resulted in a policy environment that engenders overstated aims, accepts mediocre quality evaluations, encourages narratives of success, and lacks meaningful critical reflection. It shows through extensive field work with cultural professionals and participants how the absence of criticality, transparency, and honesty limits the potential for policy learning, which the authors argue is a precondition to any radical policy change and is necessary for developing a greater understanding of the social construction of policy problems. The book presents a new framework that encourages more open and honest conversations about failure in the cultural sector to support learning strategies that can help avoid these failures in the future.
Failures in Impact Evaluation
(Oxford University Press, 2025-07-28) Jancovich, Leila; Pitches, Ceri; Stevenson, David
While many definitions of research impact exist, what most share is a belief in the responsibility of research, and researchers, to support positive change in wider society. But this article outlines the growing body of literature on both evaluation and impact that raises concerns with this approach. On the one hand an assumption of positive change may not only ignore the potential for negative impacts but also discourage research which is critical, exploratory or risky. The authors of this article further argue it may encourage narratives of success that mask stories of failure. This article discusses The FailSpace project, research funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), which examined how evaluation might better identify, acknowledge, and learn from failures This article embodies the principles of FailSpace by reflecting on the failures, rather than successes, of this research project, regarding its intended impact based on findings of an autoethnographic evaluation of FailSpace’s impact. In so doing the authors consider what might be gained from the inclusion of failure metrics in impact evaluations.
Failures in Impact Evaluation [Datasets]
(2025-07) Jancovich, Leila; Pitches, Ceri; Stevenson, David
Datasets associated with: Jancovich, L., Pitches, C. and Stevenson, D. (2025) ‘Failures in Impact Evaluation’, Research Evaluation [Preprint]. https://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/14328
The “problem” of participation in cultural policy
(Routledge, 2019-09-05) Jancovich, Leila; Stevenson, David; Eriksson, Birgit; Stage, Carsten; Valtysson, Bjarki
The need to increase recorded rates of cultural participation has become a recurring trope within cultural policy discourse. Internationally governments have commissioned research to measure who takes part in different cultural activities and developed policy initiatives to address perceived failings (see UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2012 on international approaches). Commonly this assumes that the cultural offer is beyond reproach, but it is the participant who must change in order to be able to take up the opportunities that are on offer. In other words certain patterns of cultural participation are represented as a problem caused by a deficit amongst individuals and state intervention is needed to build the capacity of individuals to take part in what is represented as mainstream culture (Miles and Gibson, 2017). In Denmark for instance, despite government surveys demonstrating high and stable rates of participation in civic activities, declining rates in specific art forms such as theatre and classical music are still seen as a problem for cultural policy to solve (Jancovich and Hansen, 2018).
Reflecting on Place and the Local
(Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2023-08-27) Durrer, Victoria; Gilmore, Abigail; Jancovich, Leila; Stevenson, David
Engaging with both place and ‘the local’ has become an important part of cultural policy rhetoric in many countries, from the resurgence of city-regional governance models to calls for new forms of ‘localism’ involving participatory governance approaches intended to engender more active citizenship and to help people feel more empowered regarding the decisions that affect them. Depending on their approach, national interventions can exacerbate existing socio-economic inequities between places and risk investing in infrastructure without due consideration to sustainability within locations or the movement of cultural workers and audiences across locations. This introduction makes the case that views of the ‘local’ have been limited in the fields of cultural policymaking and study. It summarises some of the ways both place and ‘the local’ have been conceptualised. It argues how conceptions of ‘the local’ in policy can vary significantly requiring an examination of the process of situating ‘the local’ as it occurs in policymaking as well as what happens in ‘the local’ as a result or even despite that positioning.
Situating the local in global cultural policy
(Taylor & Francis, 2019-09-06) Durrer, Victoria; Gilmore, Abigail; Jancovich, Leila; Stevenson, David
From the growth of city regions to the calls for more localism, engaging with ‘the local’ has become an increasingly important part of cultural policy rhetoric in many countries (UNESCO, 2013; UCLG, 2019). Yet despite apparent recognition that the practices of culture are always situated (and hence local), contemporary cultural policy research tends to privilege the national or international as the primary site at which cultural policy is enacted and thus, can be reformed (Durrer, et al., 2018). For all of its increasing use ‘the local’ remains abstract, seemingly deployed to legitimate activity that is of debatable benefit to the places and practices imagined by its invocation.