Culture and the Foundational Economy

At the 6^th Foundational Economy Conference, 14-16^th September Vienna
Exploring the foundational economy for just transition

 

Caradt professor Sebastian Olma, along with a group of international collaborators, joint the Australian Reset collective to present their research at the Foundational Economy conference on 14-16th September at the University of Technology, Vienna.

The Reset Collective began in 2021, convinced that the creative industries paradigm had not only run its course but was actively damaging cultural policy’s ability to grapple with new challenges. They also suggested that without culture many existing programmes of transition would be weakened. Reset identified the Foundational Approach as a useful way of radically rethinking the ground of a new progressive cultural policy.

In two panel sessions they presented their work on culture and the foundational approach, anticipating the forthcoming book Culture is Not an Industry by former Caradt visiting professor, Justin O’Connor. They discussed how it might relate to “doughnut economics” and how it might help expand the framing of that approach. They also presented the results of a comparative empirical study of foundational and cultural employment in Melbourne and Manchester.

A second session looked at the actual politics of cultural policy from a perspective derived from Kristen Ross’ work on the Paris Commune “Communal Luxury.“ The different contributions attempted to insert a radical and popular culture into the frame of the foundational economy. In doing so, they built on the recently published 3^rd edition of Caradt’s online journal Making and Breaking

Sebastian Olma looked at current attempts at democratising culture through the lens of at Mark Fisher’s rethinking of the radical sixties. Justin O‘Connor took issue with recent attempts to dismiss the politics of culture as a project of the professional managerial class. Unfortunately, Kate Oakley’s presentation on the English Premier League and its discontents had to be cancelled but can be accessed, in an earlier version, here.