Cultural Value and Everyday Life Seminar Series - Seminar 1

Seminar 1

Venue: Parkinson Building, Room B.10

Cultural Value - and the associated languages of 'impact' - continue to shape the ways in which policy professionals, arts organisations and academics are able to do their work. This seminar series responds to the contexts for key questions of culture and value by bringing both concepts into relation with 'everyday life', seeking to explore what might be learnt about questions of 'cultural value' by attending to the full range of scales through which the arts and culture are lived and understood.

The first seminar in this series will open with two 20 minute presentations (see speakers below), followed by questions and discussion.

Relocating Cultural Value: Concert Going in Everyday Life
Jonathan Gross (University of Leeds)

The concert hall and its normative behaviours of still and silent listening emerged in London and Paris in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was a site for special experiences and deep interiorities: a place in which to leave the mundane world behind, to be ‘transported’ and ecstatic. Two hundred years later, these same discourses continue to be mobilized by concert goers as they describe the value they attach to this particular way of listening to music. Jonathan’s ethnographic work at the BBC Proms, however, suggests that whilst the concert hall continues to operate as a ‘special’ location - a space in which quite unusual forms of attention and experience are possible - the value of these experiences is inextricable from practices and experiences located outside the concert hall itself: the sites of work, education, family and memory.

This paper will illustrate a number of ways in which the value(s) audience members attach to the special space of the concert hall are embedded within the locations and practices of everyday life; indicating a number of theoretical and methodological implications this has for understanding why and how the arts have importance for people, and where we might look to identify ‘cultural value’.

Dr. Jonathan Gross is a Research Associate at the University of Leeds, where he works on the AHRC Cultural Value project, ‘Understanding Cultural Value as a Complex System: Experiencing the Arts and Articulating the City in Leeds’, and on the evaluation of Arts Council England’s Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy programme. He is also a Research Associate at the University of Sheffield, working with the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC) and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group on the project, ‘Understanding Audiences for the Contemporary Arts’.

Reasonable Differences of Opinion: Conceptualising Subjective Rationality in Relation to Cultural Values
Jens Koed Madsen (Birkbeck, University of London)

In many cases, two people can look at the same information from the same source and yet arrive at completely different and sometimes-contradictory conclusions. This is a baffling psychological and philosophical reality that poses serious questions about reasoning, cultural influence, and rationality. In the past decade, researchers have pursued a new line of thinking in which rationality and argumentation springs from subjective probabilistic estimations rather than objective truth-conditions. A variety of factors have been shown to influence such estimations including emotional states, attention, and cultural background. Although in its conceptual infancy, the approach paves the way for describing differences in opinion that emerge when people from different cultures meet. The talk presents the rational framework for subjective probabilistic estimations and considers potential applications in relation to cultural values.

Dr. Jens Koed Madsen is a Lecturer and Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London, where he works on the Danish Council funded project, 'The Role of Content Strength and Source Credibility in Campaigns Combatting Obesity'. His research takes the psychology of persuasion as its point of departure, approaching persuasion from an argumentative perspective, relying on subjective, probabilistic estimations of likelihood (from a Bayesian perspective). His current research explores how the Subjective-Probabilistic Interactive Model of Persuasion (SPIMP) can be improved conceptually, how emotions integrate within the SPIMP framework, the low-level cognitive functions involved in understanding source credibility, and the analytic potential of the model through analysis of public health campaigns.

For more information about this seminar series, contact Helen Graham: h.graham@leeds.ac.uk