Dr Jonathan Vickery

Reader in Cultural Policy Studies

Tel: +44 (0)24 765 23459
Email: J dot P dot Vickery at warwick dot ac dot uk

Office: FAB1.56
School of Creative Arts, Performance and Visual Cultures (SCAPVC)
Faculty Arts Building
Central Campus
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7HS

About

I have been at Warwick since 2001, then a Henry Moore post-doctoral fellow at the University of Essex. My first task was to set up a contemporary dimension to the History of Art department, after which I was invited to create a succession of international masters degrees in the (then) Centre for Cultural Policy Studies. I have remained invested in postgraduate pedagogy, currently lead on our existing three MAs. The first of these, the MA in International Cultural Policy and Management, was pioneered in the early 1990s by the Centre’s first director, Oliver Bennet. Oliver is still editor of the field’s number one journal, the IJCP, on which I often act as reviewer, as do some other colleagues; we also make regular contributions to the field’s biennial congress – the ICCPR, sponsored by the journal. I have also acted as reviewer for other journals, publishers and most of the major research funders, and still a member of the ESRC Peer Review college and annually contribute to the Irish Research Council’s PGR awards process. My history of academic management is mostly entrepreneurial rather than bureaucratic. I was co-founder of the Aesthesis Project from 2006-2012, with its international journal and conferences in Paris, Krakow, Copenhagen, Bled, among others. and co-director of the Shanghai City Lab project (2013-15), Chair of the Art of Management and Organization Ltd (2014-2017), and on the management committee of Coventry’s Spon Spun Festival (2017-2020), among other roles and events. I have been a visiting scholar at Poznan, Belgrade and Hildesheim. Internally, I have sat on a range of committees and was Director of the CCMPS (2020-2023).

For my CV and more detail, see my LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-vickery-5244bb11/

Research interests

Areas of specialisation:

• Public culture, public policies for culture, cultural governance
• Cultural Rights (human rights), democracy and cultural politics
• Creative Economy and Sustainable Development (local community, urban and global)

secondary research interests (and practical involvement):

• Festivals and public events
• Arts organisations, management and strategy
• Art practice and the public realm
• Photography and film as research media

Current research projects

I am currently extending three project lines:

1: Cultural Diplomacy and International Cultural Relations – this is an area of academic engagement as well as research. The edited book (see below) ‘Understanding Cultural Diplomacy’ (Vickery, MacDonald, Cull), will follow with a podcast series and online symposium in the new year. I am also a lead member of the Unitwin (UNESCO) network ‘Cultural Policies, Diversity and Transformation’, where we are organising public webinars and an online PGR symposium (with the global south). I am also part of two new EU Horizon proposals, the first involving a partnership with Europe, the Middle East and Africa. I am an annual speaker on international masters programmes in Helsinki, Belgrade and Istanbul. My main writing project in this category is the IRC Lexicon Project, with ICR Research London (postings to come). I have just written the short piece ‘Soft Power as Alternative: in homage of Joseph S. Nye’, Hermès Journal, Spring 2026 (forthcoming).

2: Global cultural rights, policy, and local self-determination: this emerges from work on local devolution and regional governance in culture (forthcoming Schramme, Routledge 2025); in 2024-25 I was part of the Culture Commons ‘future of local cultural decision making’ project (see reference below). I am now negotiating a monograph project with Routledge, Human Sustainability (working title 'Culture and Global Sustainable Development').

3: Cultural Pedagogy and PGR training: I have a career-long interest in international postgraduate pedagogy, one current expression of which is the new Global Research Media Lab project, involving PhD students in publishing, editorial and critical interventions in global research discourse and the politics of knowledge production. I am co-ed. in Chief and Managing Editor of the Journal of Law, Social Justice and Global Development, which invests a lot of editorial time in early career scholar research. A significant partner is the Warwick University Press, for which a wrote a long report supporting the reviving of the Press. I am currently planning two edited volumes, which will increase the book production of the Press, A Cultural Rights Reader, and an International Cultural Relations Lexicon (see above).

Teaching

My teaching can be divided into three areas: (i) seminar based teaching, usually interactive and case-based; (ii) field-based, where I have led student groups across cities in the UK, France and Germany; and (iii) civic pedagogy, where my students have able to partner with artists and groups in the city, using engaged methods (cultural mapping, to urban ethnography, ‘curating the city’ and 'photourbanism'). I have also directed them in curating a number of small public exhibitions on urban life in Coventry (since the first ‘Kalejdoskop’ in June 2015; then the 'Taste of Life: global food justice' of June 2016; ‘Mobile Creativity Coventry, June 2017; and the final ‘Welcome Home: the immigration story of Coventry’ in June 2019). Some of this pedagogy was theorised in the special issue [Gu, O’Connor and Vickery, eds. ‘Teaching the Cultural and Creative Industries: an International Perspective’, in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, Vol. 18, No 2/3]. I founded and wrote the curriculum for three international masters degrees, over 20 new modules and by 2024 having supervised over 150 MA dissertations. I have held seminars and consultations on the shape and curriculum of a new international masters in cultural policy and management.

Research Supervision

I have supervised many successful PhD projects, currently taking students in areas of cultural policy studies – from urban culture and cities; public culture and art institutions; cultural development and local community; global development and creative economy; cultural rights, freedom and democracy. Recent successes (Spring 2025) include Younggeon Byun on Cultural Rights and Cultural Capital, Ziling Yang on Creative Clusters in Shanghai, and Lukas Enkhjargal on post-Duchamp uses of glass as art media, and Ellen Brown (Otto Saumarez Smith as lead supervisor) on the future urban-cultural landscape of inner city retail. Current ongoing PhDs are Simona Vrabcova on international cultural relations (viva passed) and Hannah Griffiths on Cultural Rights and the European Opera sector (penultimate year); I am part of the supervisorial team based at BCU for Or Tshuva (started 2025) on contemporary art, the public and polycrises.

Administrative roles

• Currently tutor on the MA Creative and Media Enterprises
• Director of PGT (and marketing and recruitment lead)
• New course development
• Warwick Interdisciplinary Research Centre for International Development (WICID) Steering Committee

Selected Publications

My last article was a complicated theory-building exercise, following 3 years of supervising a PhD project on the subject: the full reference follows, and it can be downloaded open access: Younggeon Byun and Jonathan Vickery (2025) ‘Discrimination and Cultural Policy: between Cultural Rights and Cultural Capital’, Journal of Law, Social Justice & Global Development, Issue 28: 2025:  Special Issue, 'Communicating Culture, Sustainability and Civil Society', (editors: Jonathan Vickery, Stuart MacDonald, and Nicholas J. Cull): 109-134.

Most of last year (2024-25) was editing a now published volume, and a monograph (submitted in the summer of 2025): with authored sections: Understanding Cultural Diplomacy and International Cultural Relations (eds. Vickery, MacDonald, Cull), Elgar 2025. And Forthcoming The Human Right to Culture in Law and Practice: cultural rights (Springer, 2025).

For other articles see all my drafts and conference papers on the Warwick WRAP: https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/view/author_id/7730.html

Three recent policy papers on local devolution and cultural policy can be found in this project: (e.g: https://www.culturecommons.uk/publications).

Qualifications

• BA History of Art and Architecture (UEA, Norwich): First Class (starred)
• MA Aesthetics and Visual Arts (University of Essex): Distinction
• PhD Art History & Theory (University of Essex).

Professional appointments and associations

• Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Peer Review College member (2010--2013; 2013--2016: second term by invitation); Economic and Social Research Council (ESCR) Peer Review College member (invited -- 2015)
• International Association of Art Critics (AICA): Nominated 2012.
• Aesthetics, Creativity, and Organisations Research Network (ACORN): Nominated 2008.
• Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism (SCOS): Nominated 2004.
• Research Assessor, Carnegie Trust for Scottish Universities; Expert Assessor (post-doctoral awards) Irish Research Council; Advisory Board, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policies and Cultural Diplomacy; Advisory Board, Journal of the Faculty of Arts (Belgrade University of the Arts).
• Past member of a number of other associations.