Speakers and abstracts

 

 

 

CARLES FEIXA PÀMPOLS (Lleida, 1962) is a profesor of Social anthropology at the  Universitat de Lleida (Catalonia). He specialises in youth cultura and has carried out research in Catalonia and Mexico.  He is the author of many books published in Spanish related to youth culture. He is also a member of the “consejo asesor del Observatori Català de la Joventut” and co-ordinator for hispanic communities of the  “Comité de Investigación sobre Sociología de la Juventud” of the “International Sociologists Association”.

Generation @. Youth in the digital era
This paper suggests a journey through young people's time, by recalling Kubrik's 2001 Space Odyssey that fascinated many teenagers of my generation. Since ages are culturally constructed biographical stages that make up more or less flexible borders and more or less institutionalised forms of passage through stages, we can consider the clock as a social marker of such borders and passages. From this perspective, the historical evolution of the clock can serve to illustrate the historical evolution of the life cycle (and more specifically, the historical evolution of the relationship youth-society). I suggest to take a journey through the history of the clock, taking it as a metaphor of the history of youth. With this purpose, I will take into consideration three types of clocks: the hourglass, the analogical watch and the digital watch. In each case, I will start by explaining the clock working mechanism and the process of its historical spreading, I will go on by suggesting some analogies with young people’s social conditions and their cultural images. I will finish by applying the metaphor to a graphic representation of the respective clocks that will help us think over the complex relationships between youth and time. If I suggest to call today's young people as "generation @”, it is not to put forward the hegemony of the digital watch (or the virtual conception of time). If this is not yet clear in Europe, it is a lot less clear at a universal scale, where social, geographical and generation inequalities not only do not disappear, but are reinforced with the current process of globalisation (this can explain the active role of young people in anti-globalisation movements). We are experiencing a moment of fundamental transit in the conceptions of time, similar to the ones that the first factory workers encountered when their lives started to be ruled by the clock. The consumption of audio-visual goods –particularly by young people - is probably the sector of the market that better reflects these changing tendencies, still vague, ambiguous and contradictory, but in which we might see, like in Dali's "soft" clocks, oblivion from the past, paradoxes from the present and uncertainties from the future.

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Danuta Glondys has been director of Villa Decius Association since February 2001, Kraków and an independent consultant in the field of management of culture and development of civil society.

In 1999-2001 she was regional director of the USAID programme for the development of local government in Poland. Prior to this in 1993-1999, she was the Head of the Culture Department of the Municipality of Kraków.  Formerly a lecturer in cultural policy at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, High School of Social Psychology in Warsaw and currently at Wroclaw University. Author of new cultural policy for the municipality of Krakow City; author of KRAKÓW 2000 programme and contributor to successful application for the title of Cultural Capital of Europe of the Year 2000. She is also chair of national committee of ECF (European Cultural Foundation) in Poland.
 

Young generations approach to Cultural issues
Trying to examine whether youth  culture differs from the mainstream, students, young researchers and artists from Germany, Poland, Hungary, Byelorussia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine,  Romania and France, where invited to help find answers to a set of “cultural” questions.

Starting with “identity” issues and cultural heritage values that young people would like to preserve, they were asked in what way they would like to contribute to the development of a European culture. Understanding of “mass” and “atomic” culture and finding out if young people see themselves as “global” or “local” players in culture was a subject of a next set of questions.

Another aspect of the research was connected with “tools and channels” of creation and the role “new technology” can play in substituting or complementing old and traditional methods of creation and communication. This led to a question about readiness to make compromises with current public cultural policies which makes the use of public financial resources possible.

Questions about individual preferences and attitudes to the public sector concluded the questionnaire.

Colin Mercer is founder and director of Cultural Capital Ltd, a company specialising in strategic research and development and building the 'knowledge base' for the cultural sector. He is former Professor of Cultural Policy and Director of the Cultural Policy and Planning Research Unit at The Nottingham Trent University and Director of the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies at Griffith University, Australia. He has researched, written, published and consulted widely and internationally and his most recent book in Towards Cultural Citizenship: tools for cultural policy and development published in 2002.

Socio-cultural impact indicators with children and young people in Essex
In September 2004 ,I was commissioned by Essex County Council to develop a detailed methodology for establishing and monitoring ‘indicators’ to provide an ongoing evidence base for ‘extending the benefits from recreational opportunities for children and young people’. In the language of UK local government this one of 12 priority areas agreed as part of a Public Service Agreement (PSA) with central government. PSAs, now in their second generation for the period 2005-2008, are essentially a contract between local and central government by means of which certain service delivery targets are agreed and new funding is guaranteed when targets are proven to have been met or exceeded.

All of this relies, of course, on developing ‘robust’ indicators as part of a strong evidence and knowledge base and the challenge of this project, working essentially with qualitative indicators of ‘outcomes’ is to devise a conceptual and methodological framework which will enable the quantitative representation of qualitative factors. The framework also has to be persuasive to some hard-nosed decision makers in the Office of Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM - which oversees local government in England).

The focus of the work is on two national programmes which are being implemented in various parts of Essex (usually in areas of high socio-economic deprivation). The programmes are:

-          Creative Partnerships: a national programme funded through Arts Council England by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Education and Skill (DfES). This is a programme aimed at involving creative practitioners in the school environment to improve both subject specific and cross-curriculum skills as well as ‘whole school improvement’.

-          Positive Futures: a national sports programme established by the Home Office Drugs Strategy Directorate working in partnership with local authorities and other agencies. As the source of the programme would indicate it is specifically targeted at using sport to tackle substance misuse and other offending behaviours with the aim of individual, social, educational, sporting and employment ‘improvements’.

In my presentation I will give a progress report on the project and indicate some of the conceptual bases – social capital, cultural capital – and the methodological ‘tools’ from focus groups, through large scale surveys, interviews and tests, which have been developed for this initiative.

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Lasse SIURALA

Lasse Siurala, from 1995 – 1998 and again from the year 2002  has been and is the Director of the Youth Department of Helsinki City Council, Finland. In the intermittent years he was Director of the Directorate of Youth and Sport at the Council of Europe.  Siurala is also a lecturer, researcher and associate professor at Helsinki School of Economics.

Prior to this he was President of the "Expert Committee on Youth, Research and Documentation" at the Youth Directorate of the Council of Europe (1993-1995) and then President of the "Committee of national youth research correspondents" for the Youth Directorateof the Council of Europe (1995-1998).

Changing Forms of Participation
Emergent forms of identification and expression and the policy response
During the past decades representative politics and politicians has started to lack legitimacy in the eyes of young people. At the same time new forms of moral and political engagement are emerging. There is a trend from fixed, organisation-based, long-term commitments to an ever wider variety of looser, ambivalent and even contradictory commitments, and from “rational discourses to emotional, expressive and aesthetic forms of engagements” (Hetherington 1998). These trends are anchored in current cultural, economic and social changes of increased risks, potentialities and increased pace of change. Young people must concentrate more and more to continuously develop, reflect and experiment with their life-styles, values and identities. The emphasis is more on individual processes of identification and new forms of expression than on the collective expression of them through participatory structures. Young people are looking for arenas and forms of individual every-day development and expression of their identities. It seems that cultural, popular cultural, sub-cultural activities and virtual worlds are such arenas and forms (Siurala 2002).  

A survey conducted in selected European countries on the relationship between cultural policy and the civil society summarizes seven tendencies (Ilczuk 2001). The last two tendencies are:

- the growing importance of regional and local levels in cultural policy

- departure from elitism in the direction of supporting different kinds of art and different types of audience

This article looks at (a youth sector) local level policy response to promote active citizenship of young people through popular and sub-cultural activities and virtual world engagements. It will be also argued that there is a close connection between the virtual world activities, the arts and active citizenship. The issues that emerge are:
 

- how can public sector support youth cultural and virtual world activities?

- how can it promote the awareness and transparency of the ways young people use arts, culture, subculture and the virtual worlds to become moral and political citizens?

- how can we combat the negative effects of mass culture, youth culture and the internet on youth?

Cultural expression

A Council of Europe study “Culture, creativity and the young: developing public policy” (Robinson 1999) summarizes the relationship between culture and the identity development of young people:

- the arts can have a crucial role in the strive for independence, hunger for new experiences and struggle for the sense of identity

- cultural activities are instruments to achieve social and political goals

- popular culture is the key innovative field of the identity search of today

In defining the role of the local public actors following issues must be dealt:

1. How to support youth cultural activities? How to do it without killing the counter- or sub-cultural drive behind it? The article will discuss the experiences from the City of Helsinki in supporting young peoples own music, theatre and dance activities as well as the hip hop culture.

2. How to defend the space for youth cultural activities? The problems to enable and legitimate skate-board activities and the graffiti will be illustrated.

3. How to carry out the role of the morally responsible educator in relation to youth cultures? Some of the youth cultures include elements of racism, chauvinism, extreme political action, violence etc. How is this related to the responsibility of a public sector actor to see to it that basic human rights are not violated? 

The virtual world
According to recent research in political socialization of young people (see for example Paakkunainen 2003) long-term commitment and seriousness of the older generations are being replaced by elasticity, experimentation, innovation, irony, having fun and play of the youth generation. New arenas of citizenship, which allow for quick entrance and exit, entertainment, play, meeting others on ad hoc basis, reflecting one’s own ideas and identities, and which function on a format which is natural to young people. This is the virtual world of Internet and computer games.

The role of the local public sector is highlighted through following themes:

 1.Entering the net. After WWWII young people went to streets to spend their leisure time and youth and social workers followed them there. Now young people are going to the net and the youth workers should again follow them and find the methods to work with the kids. As an illustration the example of “Global Stage”, a world-wide virtual cultural arena, will be presented.

 2. Providing access. What could the public sector do to guarantee young people equal access to the net?

3. Media education. The net is becoming an educational environment for the young people. More and more meanings are created in it. Educators, like school and youth work, should provide media education for young people spending increasingly time on the screen. One such example is the Media Centre for young people at the City of Helsinki.

4. Creating links between the virtual and ‘real’ worlds. To avoid the virtual overload of young people, strategies to link the virtual and ‘the real’ would be useful. ‘A virtual youth centre’ and ‘the identity game’ serve as examples of such projects to be developed at the Helsinki City Youth Department.

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Xavi Pérez, Cultural Manager and Anthropologist, has worked in the local public administration as well as the non-profit sector. As a result, his experience is quite diverse: festivals and performing arts production, community events, citizen participation, management of multidisciplinary  cultural centres, research and consulting. He has managed several cultural centres of proximity, among them the Ateneu popular 9 Barris, a dynamic and autonomous run centre in Barcelona. Ateneu is a national reference in the field of new circus and paratheatre arts. At the same time, it fulfills a role as generator of social cohesion and identity, in a peripheral neighborhood. While working at the Ateneu, Xavi came in contact with an interesting citizen participation process at different levels of management. He also began to attend meetings of the Trans Europe Halles network of European Independent Cultural Centres. Xavi is one of the promotors of the working group Youth, Creation and Community and the catalan platform ARTIBARRI. Currently, he is developing citizen participatory processes and managing a cultural centre in Sant Boi (Barcelona).

Youth, Creation and Community
Youth, Creation and Community is a two year process of reflection sponsored by the Jaume Bofill Foundation. This process, which began at the end of 2001, brought together a diverse group of catalan professionals, students and activists in a series of meetings to discuss and exchange impressions and advice about artistic and educational projects for youth in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Later, an in-depth analysis of the same subject was published by Jaume Bofill Foundation (Joves, Creació i Comunitat. Col.lecció Finestra Oberta nº 41) http://www.fbofill.org/php/publicacions/pdf/390  As a result of this project, a group of people created ARTIBARRI - a platform for the development of creativity and education through artistic expression (www.artibarri.org). 

In 2004, the first research project of ARTIBARRI got underway, under the heading Youth, Creation and Community. The goal was to observe, from a very broad perspective, the actual situation in Catalonia, and at the same time, gather information on different collectives and their artistic initiatives. In this way, it is possible to gain a deeper understanding of the context in which these projects develop, as well as their specific characteristics. This research is due to be completed in January 2005, however some preliminary conclusions have emerged:

Cultural democracy makes it possible to build a culture starting with youth involvement and encouraging cultural and artistic expression. That is: a culture understood as the production and exchange of meanings between the members of a society or group, focusing attention on people, interactions and processes instead of the associated products. Thus, we understand culture as a dynamic and changing process based on dialogue between different agents, constructed through communication.

Creativity: the act of becoming aware of oneself and the surrounding environment, a way of doing and being which implies personal and collective work such that it is possible to imagine change and improvements in quality of life: Creativity emerges from participation and involvement. If we think of culture as the construction of collective meanings, creativity plays a key role because it makes us take part in the building process and distances us from the role of consumers in order to become active participants. In contrast to what market offers us the value of creativity lies in the process rather than the product. Thus, the process itself is a path toward learning.

The community framework is fundamental if this potential is to be activated. It is the ideal place to work on questions such as the recovery of public space, identity, or social cohesion. The empowerment of youth is a goal of community work, a natural consequence of participation. Community dynamics contrast with the individualism of the present moment. The challenge is to find a way to insert projects and other initiatives within community processes. Art as a vehicle of expression and also as a source of strength and identities means it is an ideal channel for social action, especially for young people. It implies for agents working in network, and working to protect public spaces as places for social relation, socializing agents of proximity, etc.

Transversality: transversal perspectives strengthen feedback processes as well as interaction. We could speak of mestizo professionals and agents, and also of all kind of languages and creative patterns. This leads us to the question of integral perspective, taking into consideration all the dimensions of people and collectives as a social reality that surrounds us. This is where we live together and where community is built. The idea is to complement and combine diverse approaches, in order to be capable of a broad spectrum of action and a multitude of results. For example, it is important not to forget perspectives such as working from the emotions of community members.

Declassification of culture: in other words, value and appreciate all kinds of artistic expressions, especially those that emerge from the youth people that participates in the project or action.

Horizontal, as a key methodological principle. This means promoting, from the public administration as well as the non profit sector, dialogue and interaction between diverse expressions of social organization, creating bridges between emerging movements. It is necessary to generate and animate work platforms with the participation of the local youth people, activists, social educators, cultural managers, artists... together, all these people can share projects they develop jointly.

Participation, working in new methodologies, and new socio-educational processes as an act to change our experience of art and culture.

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Greg Richards is programme coordinator at the Interarts Foundation in Barcelona. Having obtained a PhD in geography from University College London, he worked initially in the field of tourism marketing, specialising in conferences and exhibitions. He became a partner with Tourism Research and Marketing (UK) in 1984, and has undertaken numerous research and feasibility studies.  He has taught on a wide range of tourism and leisure courses in further and higher education, and founded the European Association for Tourism and Leisure Education (ATLAS) in 1991. As Chair of ATLAS he has led a number of EU funded projects in the fields of tourism education, cultural tourism, sustainable tourism, tourism employment, conference tourism and ITC in tourism. His main research interest is cultural tourism, and has edited books on Cultural Tourism in Europe (1996), Crafts Tourism Development and Marketing (1999), Tourism and Sustainable Community Development (2000) and European Tourism and Cultural Attractions (2001). In collaboration with the International Student Travel Confederation (ISTC) he designed the Independent Traveller Survey, which analyses the travel behaviour and attitudes of young people in eight countries. He is currently conducting research on the relationship between Catalan festivals, social capital and tourism, and the image of Catalunya with residents and visitors.

Julie Wilson has a PhD in human geography and specialises in the field of tourism geographies, with research and teaching interests in youth and independent travel, urban and cultural tourism, and tourism place imagery. She is currently Marie Curie fellow in the Department of Geography, Autonomous University of Barcelona and research fellow at the University of the West of England, Bristol (UK). Current / previous visiting positions held include the University of Barcelona (Spain), Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona (Spain) and Aalborg University (Denmark).  She has directed a range of research projects and major publications include The Global Nomad (2004) The Impact of Cultural Events on City Image (Urban Studies, 2004) and Marine Ecotourism (2003) and she is currently undertaking longitudinal research on the socio-cultural and image-related impacts of the Universal Forum of Cultures 2004 event, in Barcelona.

Today’s youth traveller’s: tommorrow’s global nomads
Travel is an increasingly important part of youth culture. Those who can travel use their experiences to form new identities or confirm existing ones, while those who can’t travel are constantly confronted by images of a better life, which is always elsewhere. Travel is also positioned as a life-changing experience, a right of passage into adulthood. It is not surprising, therefore, that young people are avid travellers. Youth travel currently accounts for 20% of global international travel, and young people travel longer and spend more than their older counterparts.

In spite of the widespread narratives on the beneficial cultural impacts of  travel, there is little hard evidence to back up the assertion that travel broadens the mind, rather than the backside. Recent research undertaken by ATLAS in conjunction  with the International Student Travel Confederation has sought to gather more information on the cultural aspects of travel, and the impact it has on young people. To date over 3000 students and work exchange participants from 10 countries have been surveyed, both before and after major trips.

The results of this research indicate that cultural activities do form an important part of the travel experiences of young people, and there is a strongly expressed desire to find out more about local culture and meet local people. The extent to which this is achieved, however, is slightly less than the initial expectations of the travellers, who often spend more time with fellow travellers than local people. There is a measurable impact of travel experience on attitudes to issues such as tolerance and sustainability, although increased tolerance is usually related to a generalised acceptance of cultural difference rather than a specific acceptance of other ethnic or religious groups.

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Rob van Kranenburg,  from 1996 until 2000,  developed online learning environments at the Departement Leraren Opleiding in Ghent. From 1999- 2002 he worked as teacher-coordinator of the New Media program within the Film and Television studies Department of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). During this period he also worked on the Balie programming: a series on media education. He was on the national Dutch Steering Committee on Media Education for two years. After the UvA he worked with John Thackara on the Doors of Perception 7 conference (Amsterdam, 14-16 November 2002). This Doors conference focused on the design challenge of pervasive computing. He then mentored a postgraduate course 'Theatricality' at Arts Performance Theatricality in Antwerp, taught at the Willem de Kooning Academy, St. Joost, and MA Graphic Design (Breda). He currently teaches theory at CMD (Communication and Multimedia Design Centre), Breda. At the moment he is interim Director of the Virtual Platform, a new media network organization, to which he will remain attached as project leader in emerging technologies. In this field he organizes workshops on RFID in Amsterdam and London. He is currently serving as external advisor to the ad hoc committee on media education from the Dutch Raad voor Cultuur. 

Creative minds in Europe - employment, economy and multiculturalism in hybrid multi-media work
Where are the new labs of the 2010s that are driven by young people? E-culture has been so succesfull that the digikids do not question the browser as simply one of the zillion ways to visualize the web, do not feel a deep need to go beyond the editor towards the code, on the contrary are very satisfied with the way things are. How will this situation lead to a creative industry that sets out to develop a sustainable service based economy in a hybrid world? Where are the frictions? Where is the dissatisfaction that leads to alternative ways of seeing, to new, deeply new insights ino a networked world? Where is the anger?

It was supposed to last for six weeks, the first Digital City in Amsterdam in 1993. Young idealists, hackers, 'hippies from hell' as they are called in Ine Poppe's documentary, provided free email and started the digital revolution with their internet provider xs4all. We are only eleven years later and the analogue world is becoming more hybrid as we speak with digital connectivity. Xs4all has become a part of corporate KPN. The two most successful Dutch new media labs, Waag Society for Old and New Media (Amsterdam) and V2 (Rotterdam) grew out of this amalgam of idealistic culture. Young people with a view on public culture, on public domain, on access for all. In less than 15 years they have grown into academic nodes on the SURFNET network, the Dutch academic network. This is unprecedented. Never before has a group of autonomous, critical individuals been able to get their ideas, narrative, theories and projects accepted as credible in terms of the existing academic discourse in such a short time span. How was this possible? Because of the liberal climate in the eighties and early nineties in the Netherlands that did allow for bottom-up creative initiatives.

Our current intellectual climate both stimulates top-down creative industrial initiatives and highlights unsafety and insecurity as the best strategy to confront a public environment. This is a recipe for long-term economic disaster. If we agree that it is foremost the creative minds that companies need to keep at hand- that programming and management maybe outsourced to India or China - then we will have to face up to the fact that such creative young minds are no longer there for companies to keep.

The notion of change is the only constant in the European Union. Within the various member states the very concept of the 'nation state', as opposed to a viable Europe of regions, is revitalised by the growing frictions between a native white and a partly native 'foreign' population. Research has shown that, although you would expect close encounters to occur as groups grow more alike in size, the opposite is the case. In most European countries we can therefore expect a growing debate about cultural issues. A policy that is fear-driven highlights 'otherness', stresses differences, thus playing into the hands of conservative positions who want to keep things 'as they are'.

In such a Creole world new public kinship relationships will develop. For whom do you feel responsible? A networked, hybrid world needs a notion of what it means when 'understanding' takes place. What happens when you 'understand' something? When do you feel responsible for the implications of your understanding? When is a design, a project, an action successful? What are the criteria for its successfully disappearing into the local 'flow'? A notion that can be developed in this context is that of 'bystander intervention'. When do you feel responsible enough to act? To help? To offer your services? To develop new business models in a service based economy? To develop a sense of a need for a strong public domain and acces for all?

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Aleksandra Uzelac is a research fellow at the Culture and Communication Department of the Institute for International Relations in Zagreb. She holds Ph.D. in Information Sciences of the University of Zagreb. Her interests include impact of ICT on cultural issues, virtual networks, organisation of knowledge in the cultural field and issues of  public domain and cultural heritage. She is a member of the Culturelink team and the Culturelink review editorial board. In 2000 she was initiator of the CultureNet Croatia web portal and she is a member of the steering board for the portal development.

eCulture – a trans-generational issue?
The information and communication technology (ICT) revolution started some decades ago but its development towards network logic that was brought about by the Internet gave it an extra push and opened the door of information society. The concept of an information society suggests universal and free access to information services (thus knowledge) for all citizens/users/consumers and possibility for an active participation in knowledge sharing.  Castells and Himanen claim that in the long run, the informational economy (as a basis of information society) needs to have a sustainable social dimension. (Castells, Himanen, 2002, str 88) Planning to achieve social justice and inclusion, rather than exclusion, needs to take into account possibilities that ICT brings and needs of people. But leaving development to the mercy of market forces will not achieve the proclaimed aim of inclusive and participatory information society.

Don Foresta distinguishes between 'cyberspace' that he describes as cosmopolitan and liberal universe, myth, and vision of a virtual and 'information superhighway' that he describes as an industrial project and a powerful instrument in the advanced marketing of audio-visual products and other pay services (Foresta, Mergier, Serexhe, 1995). In cyberspace a vision of users is one of active collaborators and participants in knowledge sharing, in later users are seen as consumers of services and buyers of products.

eCulture can be seen in both above described visions, realized in many different forms, from on-line information, commercial and non commercial services, interactive initiatives among users, multimedia products, databases, etc. and it can be looked at from different perspectives. This issue was discussed at the Culturelink and Circle Round Table 'eCulture: The European Perspective: Cultural Policy - Knowledge Industries - Information Lag'that took place in Zagreb in 2003. There are diverse issues that contribute to the concrete virtual products that form part of today's eCulture - technological layer, organizational solutions, legislation and financial constraints, intellectual property rights, etc. Question is what is sustainable and for whom it is being developed. At the end of all, the success depends whether users find virtual products interesting - and users are not homogeneous category, they are interested in different topics, belonging to different social or age groups, etc .  Users can be looked at as consumers or as citizens/participants - i.e. different active and passive categories.

As existing data shows, to be able to grasp benefits of online information and services and contribute to it, an educational level is important element. So it is not surprising that many existing national strategies put emphasis on young people and education component of Internet and eCulture for the development of information society.  Consumers or participants? What will be prevailing category of the next generation?

A case will be described of one civil society NGO in Croatia dealing with cultural and new media issues - their activities, structures and models of cooperation through which they are trying to influence the future shape of information society in such a way that will guaranty possibility of active participation, creative freedom and free knowledge sharing.

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Kirill Razlogov, born in 1946, M.A. in art history (Moscow University), professor, Ph.D. in cultural studies, Director of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research, author of 14 books and more than 300 articles on art history, film and the media, cultural policy and development. Organiser of film festivals and TV programmes on film and art. Previous positions: researcher at the Russian Film Archive (Gosfilmofond), special assistant to the president of the State Film Committee, professor of film history, media and cultural studies at the State Film Institute (VGIK), High courses for film directors and script writers and the Institute for European culture in Moscow. Program Director of the Moscow International Film Festival. Scientific Secretary of the National Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences of Russia.

Is youth culture the global culture?
Is youth culture the global culture of tomorrow?

The global culture can be defined as a set of rules, habits and traditions transmitted by the mass media and adopted by everybody independently of ethnic origins, nationality, age, sex, religion etc. It is an abstraction that obviously does not exist in the real world but can be reconstructed as a tendency.

On a practical level this crucial information is transmitted by cultural products (including arts) known to everyone, from the classics to MacDonald’s and Coca-Cola.

As the mass media in a market economy are dependant upon the interests and desires of the paying public, in reality all strata of society are not represented equally. Young people are favorites because they have more free time than working adults for leisure activities. Of course, it concerns mostly children of well off families.

As a result the mass commercial culture is partly youth oriented with a cult of youth, beauty and sex. The other part is directed to non-working women (soap operas).

In every present times there is a conflict between grown-up intellectuals who pretend to govern the artistic world and un(der)educated boys and girls who like lowbrow entertainment.

There is a theory that many experimental high culture discoveries are accepted by general public and adopted by mass culture after a period of twenty years.

The same is true if the opposite: popular films, songs and books, which became bestsellers but were first despised by critics, are adopted by the cultural establishment after the same 20-25 years. Examples: the Beatles or Johnny Halliday 

There are basically two reasons for that: one aesthetic and the other one sociological.

The distance compensates the absence of aesthetic distance in mass cultural product for the artistically educated in time.

The young people taking over the power in culture remember and rehabilitate the things that they used to love.

That makes youth culture the global culture of tomorrow.

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Margot KENNY

Margot holds a BA in Fine Art/Sculpture from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin and an MA in Interactive Media from Dublin Institute of Technology. She has worked within a range of Irish organisations including the Galway Film Centre, Community Media Network and the Sculptors Society of Ireland, to develop opportunities for individuals and communities to engage with and use communications media and the arts to represent their views and interests. Much of this work has involved working with young people. Margot is presently Youth Arts Officer with the National Youth Arts Programme at the National Youth Council of Ireland. The Programme supports the development of arts-based practices with young people within the youth sector in Ireland, and promotes opportunities for young people to engage with artistic and cultural production.

Promoting youth culture
The National Youth Council of Ireland (NYCI) is a membership-led unbrella organisation that represents and supports the interests of voluntary youth organisations in Ireland and uses its collective experience to act on issues that impact on young people. The National Youth Arts Programme (NYAP) is an initiative of NYCI, supported by the Arts Council and the Department of Education and Science. It acts as an advocate for youth arts and supports opportunities for young people to realise their potential both artistically and personally through arts practice across a range of media.

A central tenet of NYAP's work is that young people are artistic and cultural producers in their own right. When empowered to contribute their own unique ideas and approaches, young people not only benefit their own personal development, but enrich the artistic and cultural life of the entire community. Supporting young people to develop as confident citizens participating in the wider community is core to the principles of youth work, underpinning the work of both NYCI and the NYAP.

Much of NYAP's work has focused on providing support and training to adult professionals using the arts in their work with young people. More recently, the need to engage more directly with young people themselves has become apparent. Increasingly, NYAP is acting to support and bring together the cultural interests of young people themselves with the capacity of professional youth workers and artists to involve young people fully in Youth Arts planning, programming and activity.

To be really meaningful, cultural activity must be relevant to the interests, concerns and values of those participating. This is the ongoing challenge of developing effective Youth Arts policy and practice. Who decides what will be made, how and why? To be active and willing partners in the creation of culture, young people's ideas and chosen media for expression must be recognised as valid. Currently, music, film and digital media are areas where independent youth-led culture is most energetic in Ireland. The challenge for advocates such as the NYAP is to both support creative youth culture while also continuing to build connections for young people into the wider community and towards future opportunity and fulfilment. 

The notion that youth culture exists as a separate autonomous region in society is questionable. Young people are consumers of a vast array of cultural produce in today's society, sometimes diminishing the confidence to be creative cultural producers themselves. Yes, young people use text messaging and internet chat-rooms to communicate with each other, but this is not a closed culture populated only by young people, nor is the content or mode of current communications technology created or controlled entirely by young people. Youth culture ultimately operates within and is to an extent dependent on the wider culture.

In view of this, the NYAP promotes Youth Arts as a creative alternative to passive consumption of mass culture and as a means of engaging actively in the wider community, across generational and cultural boundaries.

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BO Andér, for the past 27 years, has been employed by the Culture Department of the City of Stockholm and for the past five years he has been a Strategy Developer. His main tasks consist of developing and writing about a diversity of culture policy issues related to the general development of the City as well as collaborations with other departments and cultural organisations concerning specific projects.  His academic background is a literary historian, with an uncompleted thesis on Swedish newspapers as literature in the 19^th century. He worked earlier co-ordinating culture committees in the suburbs of Stockholm, as programme producer in The Culture Centre of Stockholm, as Secretary of the Culture Committee of the City of Stockholm and 1^st Secretary of the Culture Department.

Youth and the territory. How are young people are ‘included’ in culture?
The EUROCITIES Conference on Young People’s Creativity and Participation in the Cultural Life of European Cities held in Stockholm on December 3-4, 2004, brought together 94 participants from 25 European cities - 64 politicians and officials and 30 young people, age 16-21. The young people had met previously at two separate occasions within the project Forum for Young Citizens, in Stockholm 2003 and in Bergen 2004, where they discussed cultural policy issues from a youth perspective and expressed themselves through workshops.

A special visual method for heterogenous groups was elaborated for the Stockholm conference managing three stages - critique, vision and implementation on the basis of young people’s creativity and participation in the cultural life of European cities. It was carried out by a structure of intense workshops of different kinds.

The Stockholm Manual on Young People’s Creativity and Participation in the Cultural Life of European Cities was the very concrete result of the conference. The manual is meant to be used as tool in the daily work of cities concerned about youth culture dealing with the credibility gap that so often exists today between young people and cultural policy. It is meant to be a methodical guide to respecting young people’s capacity to take responsibility for their ideas and giving them opportunities to developing culture in dialogue with representatives of established structures. The EUROCITIES Culture Forum will be asked at its next regular meeting in Barcelona in March 2005 to approve on The Stockholm Manual.

Behind lies a strong belief that the cultural dimension has to be strengthened at the very heart of European policy. Culture has to be taken seriously in building and developing European cities into creative communities making space for innovative and challenging ideas manifested by its citizens.There are great efforts and expectations put into the manual from the devoted participants of the Stockholm conference. These expectations could be find under headings such as “Good leadership and mentors are needed for young people in all areas of society”, “Volontary Year for creative work”, “Open up art and cultural organisations to young people”, “Free culture!” and “Eurocities Forum of Young Citizens - FYC”.

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