Cultural and Media Policy Studies News and Events

David Wright's new article, 'Making tastes for everything: omnivorousness and cultural abundance' has been published in the latest edition of the Journal for Cultural Research. The article offers some speculative discussion on the current state of what has been termed 'the omnivore debate', about emerging patterns of cultural consumption in Western societies. It argues that some of the 'discoveries' about omnivorousness - especially those relating to the crossing of cultural hierarchies - are increasingly unremarkable in a world where 'legitimate' and 'popular' culture are distributed on commercial terms and central to the curricula of accrediting institutions. This might require new ways of finding out how 'taste' matters to social organisation.

Warwick students can read the article via the library web-page here

The article is available via the Journal Home-page here

You can follow David Wright's research on Academia.edu

The International Journal of Cultural Policy, founded and edited by Oliver Bennett, has been selected by Thomson Reuters for inclusion in both its Social Science and Arts and Humanities Citation Indexes. These indexes provide researchers, teachers and students with essential bibliographic and citation data from the world’s leading journals.

Edited by David Looseley, an Associate Fellow of the Centre, a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy has now been published on the subject of cultural policy and popular culture. The aim of the issue is to investigate relationships between policy and the popular in a variety of settings. Some of these settings are geographic, involving government policies for the arts as a whole in Britain and France. Others involve less recognised modes of cultural action: live music in the UK; education in France; and canonisation strategies in the Catholic Church. In addition to David's article, which compares how policy discourses have conceptualised popular culture in Britain and France, two other contributions have been made by members of the Centre: Jeremy Ahearne examines the culture-shaping activities pursued through French educational policies; Oliver Bennett explores the strategic promotion of saints by the Catholic Church - and some of the messages conveyed - during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II.