Cultural Policies in the UK (Bachelor Year 3 / Fall)

This class focusses on contemporary British cultural policies. It aims to study its key traditional actors and institutions, its economic and operational models, as well as the values and ambitions which have driven them since its major components were established. In that sense, the creation of the Welfare state institutions in postwar Britain was a major turning point in cementing the links between public institutions and the arts. We shall also study how cultural policies have been greatly influenced by the Victorian liberal understanding of public service and later by the contribution of the British Cultural Studies and its major scholarly voices, including Richard Hoggart or Raymond Williams, who questioned the fundamentally elitist and class-based nature of national cultural policies in the 1950s and 1970s. Besides, the idea will be to analyze which culture(s) have actually been promoted and represented, especially during key national events, such as the 1951 Festival of Britain or the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. The way Britain’s multicultural diversity has been construed and represented is also an aspect of the topic, namely, the emergence of often marginalized BAME artists.