Arts Management Quarterly on “What does Cultural Leadership mean to me?”

Arts Management Quarterly is dedicated to a visionary, exemplary and cutting-edge cultural sector that is open for new theoretical and practical approaches also from the non-western world. The term Cultural Leadership seems to be trending. Universities increasingly offer study programmes with that name, academic associations organize conferences around the term, funding bodies of arts organisations send employees on expensive training programmes with this label. When an arts institution gets into crisis, the public blames leadership and calls for leadership at the same time just a different, better one. Cultural leadership as a concept seems to work almost like some chemical magic trick: you combine two terms, which by themselves are already hard to define, and somehow a new concept emerges which gets used a lot, but is rarely questioned in its meaning.

So, what is Cultural Leadership? Or, to put it more precisely: What does the term mean to people in the field of arts management practice, research and/or teaching? Which different meanings does the term take in different artistic, institutional or cultural/geographical contexts? Who embraces it happily and likes to use it, and in which ways? Who feels the need to reject it and for which reasons?

We would like to invite papers on What does Cultural Leadership mean to me? from arts management practitioners people who self-identify as cultural leaders or who reject that term as well as researchers and educators working in the field of arts management. We particularly welcome contributions coming from outside Europe and North America. Articles are expected to not only give a personal interpretation of the term Cultural Leadership, but to also reflect on the question how the concepts meaning has been shaped in the specific local context of the author and what this implicates for his or her practice of arts management.

Please submit an abstract for your proposed article (no more than 500 words) as well as a short bionote by September 9th to office@artsmanagement.net. The editorial board of this special edition of Arts Management Quarterly will review all submitted abstracts and let the authors know about the publication decisions by September 23rd. The final contribution with a length of up to 1.500 words should be submitted by November 5th. Contributions can include references, if necessary. Images of the practical work of the authors as well as diagrams and charts are very welcome.