Cultural and Media Policy Studies News and Events

The theme of the Forum was ‘Culture in the Era of Global Convergence’. Professor Bennett’s paper, entitled ‘Cultural policy and the conflict of values’, suggested that cultural policies could best be seen as an assertion of cultural values. As such, they emanated not just from modern institutions but from all those thinkers, theorists and intellectuals that had sought, over time, to prohibit or assert  particular cultural values and practices. Conflicts of value were thus intrinsic to the very idea of cultural policy. Having illustrated his thesis with some historical examples, Professor Bennett went on to explore sites of conflict in the cultural policies of contemporary Western governments and institutions. He concluded that an understanding of these conflicts and of why particular values came to prevail represented one of the central tasks of cultural policy research.

A PDF transcript of Professor Bennett’s paper and other contributions to the Forum is available for download.