Institutions, Governance, Citizenship

A display of four men figures on a stage. One is casting a vote into a box as the others look on, accompanied by two koalas. A newspaper board reads In modern liberal democracies such as Australia the shaping of citizens - their cultural capacities and competencies - has been mediated in various ways through the work of institutions that act on the beliefs, habits, values and behaviours of the population. Cultural institutions such as museums, art galleries, heritage sites, archives, libraries, the cinema, broadcasting, and cultural policy agencies have developed distinctive ways of making culture a resource for social change. Cultural disciplines such as art history, literary studies, aesthetics, archaeology, sociology and anthropology have played key roles in these processes.

Educational institutions have been equally important, particularly since the nineteenth-century development of popular schooling, in cultivating habitual dispositions that have informed the development of civic forms of conduct. It is no accident that there have always been, and continue to be, strong interactions between cultural and educational institutions in the shaping of citizens. Indeed, these have become, if anything, stronger over the period since the 1980s when, in Australia and internationally, the entitlements and responsibilities of cultural citizenship have been added to the earlier entitlements and responsibilities of political and social citizenship.

This theme focuses on the changing roles of cultural and educational institutions in Australian responses to the challenges of global social change in the 21st century. Questions concerning the relations between human rights and global governance will also be examined. Its initial projects will focus on the changing civic role of museums with respect to the relations between indigenous and non-indigenous citizens, and the role of cultural pedagogies in shaping new dispositions and capacities. With their respective work on museum history and theory and on the contemporary roles of museums in relation to civic education and climate change, Bennett and Cameron contribute a unique blend of museological competences. Watkins and Noble, drawing on their research on both multiculturalism and the formation of the 'scholarly habitus', contribute expertise on the relationships between cultural pedagogy, diversity and conduct.

Events held under the Institutions, Governance, Citizenship theme

Books

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