Research updates

Our last blog post presented an introduction to INVENT’s current interview data collection phase. In this post, we want to highlight a subset of questions, which explore how people relate to digital media in their lives, and how those impact their cultural practices.

During the past summer, INVENT’s members have conducted interviews with locals and migrants in each of the consortium countries. In the following blog, we share preliminary findings regarding the ways in which migrants take part (or don’t) in their new country’s cultural offerings. The countries included in this blog are the UK, Denmark, Finland, Croatia, and Serbia (in which immigrant

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INVENT has brought out a new report that comprises a combination of data and analyses capturing an answer to the question: What does culture mean to Europeans?To map out the multiplicity of understandings of culture within and across Europe, the report opens with a brief discussion of the diverse conceptions of culture, the current “cultural abundance” and how the manifold

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It is a commonly shared view that “culture is good for you”.  In cultural policy, there has long been concern about citizens that do not participate in any cultural activities, such as visiting museums or concerts. Cultural non-participation has often been treated as a problem – even though non-participation is actually very common. An explanation for the low rates of

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On June 30, 2022, the Dutch INVENT team attended the Boekman Foundation conference entitled “The Value of Culture after Corona” and presented their findings from a big-data-analysis of online cultural petitions among Dutch citizens and organizations. The findings presented are part of the second wave of data scraping carried out by the INVENT consortium that explores which cultural petitions dominate

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Socio-cultural centres, community centres, social centres, youth centres, creative centres… are among the many names of the cultural centre. So, what are the cultural centres, and why are they important for the societal value of culture? Cultural centres exist in many forms but are easily recognizable by their multifaceted and open character – think accessible places of many socio-cultural activities

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Earlier this month, The Guardian published an article about a new study which examined the impact of museum visits on GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) results in the UK. This research joins previous scholarship which explored cultural capital and its relations to sociodemographic differences (Katz-Gerro and Meier Jaeger,2015; Yaish, Katz-Gerro, 2012). According to the new study, museum outings had

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Is cultural journalism becoming more personalized and subjective? One of the key debates of contemporary cultural sociology concerns the alleged fragmentation of cultural authority. In an era of crisis of legacy media and normative authorities and, at the same time, strong individualization, who decides what can be defined as valuable culture? Quality journalism covering culture is a good place to

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The contemporary Serbian society is deeply divided over the question of what and what kind of culture can and should have the status of legitimate – “valuable”, “true”, and “morally correct”. Conflicts over the “right” worldview have taken the form of Culture wars. The multitude of “Serbian divisions”, with the inevitable simplifications, summaries and generalizations, can be reduced to the

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In February 2020, the INVENT project commenced having planned out the multiple interdisciplinary research queries set to be conducted over the course of the project. Not long after, the Covid-19 pandemic introduced itself as an unforeseen factor and formidable force that has gone on to interlace itself throughout nearly every stage of the project thus far. What Covid has brought

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