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

Newsinger, Jack; Serafini, Paula

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Authors

Paula Serafini



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 Mar 28, 2024
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

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