Performative resilience: How the arts and culture support austerity in post-crisis capitalism

Newsinger, Jack; Serafini, Paula

Abstract

Resilience is a key theme in contemporary post-crisis capitalism, prominent across government policy, popular discourses, business and management thinking and academia. This article is about the deployment of the concept of resilience in cultural policy and practice under conditions of austerity. It is based on an extensive engagement with literature, an analysis of cultural policy discourse, and qualitative data drawn from 23 in-depth interviews with freelance cultural practitioners. The findings contribute to the literature on the politics of resilience in policy and society (Allen et al., 2014, Diprose 2014, Burman 2018, Gill & Orgad 2018, Harrison 2012) and the effects of austerity on culture (Felton et al. 2010, Pasquinelli & Sjöholm 2015, Pratt 2015). We adapt Robin James's (2015) concept of resilience to show how arts leaders and practitioners generate performative narratives that seek to publicly represent their capacity to adapt to austerity, and we explore the different versions of resilience thinking that these narratives mobilise. We argue that resilience in cultural policy and practice unwittingly produces a discursive surplus which becomes reinvested in institutions, providing subsequent justification for the processes of post-crisis austerity itself.

Citation

Newsinger, J., & Serafini, P. (2021). Performative resilience: How the arts and culture support austerity in post-crisis capitalism. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 24(2), 589-605. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549419886038

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 29, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Dec 9, 2019
• Publication Date: 2021
• Deposit Date: Sep 30, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 1, 2019
• Journal: European Journal of Cultural Studies
• Print ISSN: 1367-5494
• Electronic ISSN: 1460-3551
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 24
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 589-605
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549419886038
• Keywords: Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous); Cultural Studies; Education
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2721579
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1367549419886038
• Contract Date: Sep 30, 2019