Artful Conversations

Episode Notes Marnie Badham, Senior Research Fellow at the RMIT School of Art , joins Annetta to talk about ‘social’ art, project management, and social transformation

Episode Notes Today on the show, we’re joined by Calgary Arts Development President & CEO Patti Pon.

Episode Notes Today we had the opportunity to speak with Carolyn Jervis, Founding Director, and Curator of the John and Maggie Mitchell Gallery.

Episode Notes We had the pleasure of sitting down with Tara Owen and Jenna Stanton to discuss their roles as Board Chair and Executive Director at the Alberta Craft Council.

Episode Notes Our guest today is Kelly Jerrott to talk about her experience with local government and its role in the development of the cultural sector within the community.

Episode Notes We catch up with Joshua Semchuk, “Project Jedi” at Bottom Line Productions.

Episode Notes Join Katrina as she welcomes Kathleen Darby, General Manager at the Creative City Network of Canada, to discuss audience engagement and maintaining art in cities.

Episode Notes Kelly Reay, Artistic Director of New West Theatre,  joins Annetta to discuss art leadership outside of a major city centre.

Episode Notes Our guest for this episode is nationally recognized culture and community leader, Karen Ball.

Episode Notes Join Katrina as she chats with four emerging arts managers who have participated in arts management education programs at the Rozsa Foundation or MacEwan University.

Episode Notes Lending his voice to today's podcast is David Stevenson,  Dean of Arts, Social Sciences and Management, and a professor of cultural policy and arts management at Queen Margaret University.

Episode Notes Daniel Turner, Deputy Dean of the School of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the West of Scotland, joins host Annetta Latham to discuss the world of event bidding.** --------------------------------------------------------** Artful Conversations 2020 Dr. Daniel Turner Interview Welcome to Artful Conversations - a podcast about arts and cultural management. Hosts Annetta Latham and Katrina Ingram, interview leaders who help shape the world of arts and culture. We share their stories, their insights and observations. This podcast season has been brought to you with the support of MacEwan University and The Rozsa Foundation. ANNETTA: Welcome to Artful Conversations, I'm your host, Annetta Latham. We have Daniel Turner here with us today. Daniel is the deputy dean of the School of Business and the Creative Industries at the University of West of Scotland, UWS.  His research interests focus upon social cultural exploration of events and sports and the use of such activities to generate income, social and cultural impacts. Daniel was going to be joined today by his co-author, David McGillivray, who is also a professor of events and digital cultures at the University of West of Scotland, but unfortunately, David has been called away. Daniel and David are the co-authors of Event Bidding: Politics, Persuasion and Resistance.  Daniel, it's great to have you join us today. Thank you for being part of Artful Conversations. Can you tell us about your scholarly career pathway?  DANIEL: Yeah, of course, actually the day that we're recording this, is my sixth work anniversary for UWS. I've been in academia full time since 2007, spent a few years working on my Ph.D. At the moment, as you say, I'm in the role of deputy dean of the School of Business and Creative Industries, but my academic background has always been in areas to do with sport and events, and my doctorate, which I completed at Glasgow Caledonian University over a very long period of time, looked at the growth of essentially adventure recreation publicly funded skate parks in Scotland using a figurational sociology approach with the work of Norbert Elias in there.  So I've always had a real interest in the interplay between public policy and my undergraduate degree was in leisure management, so I guess what used to be called the leisure industry - sports events, tourism. So having come through with my PhD very much in the sport terrain, I started teaching at Glasgow Caledonian 13 years ago full time, and there my role took me across sports and events and increasingly my interest in public policy and the interaction between these areas, of events and in my case, sporting events, playing in developing cities, developing nations, growing their economies, what contributions you are making, always really trying to have a bit of criticality about claims that are advanced, when those types of things happened.  So three years in that role led me up to Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, which is where you and I met for the first time, where I had the role of program leader for what was at that time, the new event management program up in Aberdeen. So working with colleagues to build that program from its first intake of students over a period of four years. And that's really where I started to become increasingly more and more focused on the role of events. Obviously, at the time you and I got to know one another, you were involved with the youth festival in Aberdeen. And a lot of my role there was about getting students to engage with these events and thinking again critically about how they might contribute to the visitor economy in a country which is, a city sorry, that was really starting to think of those questions, I guess in some ways for the first time. That was where event bidding started to come on to my horizon a little bit as well. At the time I was there Aberdeen was bidding for the UK City of Culture, it was quite interesting to look at some of the information around that and how we were trying to do that. And then six years ago, the opportunity to move back into the west of Scotland, which is home for me, came up. So I came back to the west of Scotland and started at UWS, again primarily there as a senior lecturer in event management teaching some of the same areas with some of the same issues. But in the last couple of years, I've kind of moved into the management and leadership side of working in a university, which isn't quite as much fun for doing research, but it's still an exceptionally challenging role. And a lot of my research interests are now starting to spin out into issues related to higher education, student engagement, I spent time overseas recently looking at how universities in Sri Lanka deal with academic engagement, but still maintaining this interest in essentially events and sport. So whilst at UWS event bidding has been my main area of focus, but also actually, interestingly, come back to some of the things that interested me originally with my colleagues, Sandro Carnicelli, who's one of our senior lecturers here, and parallel to working on the event bidding stream, Sandro and I developed some work around lifestyle sports and public policy. So almost going full circle back in the early 2000s. So that has been the last 13 years, I guess.  ANNETTA: Coming back to what you mentioned before, you and I met when we were both living in Aberdeen and at the time Aberdeen was bidding for the City of Culture and which is a UK massive kind of regeneration policy and hope. So, when you mentioned before, kind of out of that became a little bit of interest around event bidding. What was it that really sparked your interest? Because I know, we both lived through that experience and we were both part of those initial early meetings where they were thinking about the bid and how to do it. You know, I went in one direction and you kind of have now taken that concept, and you've written a book, really. You know, for our listeners, what would you describe as what is event bidding, like what are you talking about when you're talking about that?  DANIEL: OK, so there is essentially a series of events, whether sporting or cultural, which would be best be described as peripatetic, so they move from city to city, country to country, the most notable examples being the Olympics, World Cup, for example. And it was actually the FIFA World Cup that I think first certainly caught my interest in this, David, who can't be with us today, he and I worked together for a really long time, and we'd stayed in touch. And I had moved to Aberdeen and he was in Glasgow. And it was round about the time that Qatar was bidding to host the 2022 World Cup. And actually in preparing for today. I was going back through my notes and there were some emails that I just after I got into Aberdeen in 2010 saying this is interesting, someone should look at this. And we were kind of swapping a few messages back and forth about what that might look like, what that might be.  A  big part of that conversation, and subsequently became the event bidding book five years later. Yeah, but being in Aberdeen was really interesting to me because the City of Culture award was literally on your doorstep. Aberdeen is the third biggest city in Scotland, but it's a city of 100,000 people. So it's still a very compact city, it's a small place, everyone knows everyone. And so there was an opportunity to really see firsthand what was happening. And so Event Bidding essentially then relates to the process by which cities or countries or combinations of countries increasingly follow the case to an awarding body who typically are the owners of the event, that they should be allowed to host that event. And it's a process which is in some cases very lengthy, can be a number of years. It can be exceptionally costly and in some cases hundreds of thousands for small events, and tens of millions for large scale events. And I think we felt it was a process that often happens out with the public eye. Yeah, often it's only when the host is announced that people really started to understand it. So that's really what I mean by that process, is everything that happens before the moment someone stands up on stage and says ‘and the host is’ so we were interested in, I guess, the gestation of the event rather than the delivery of the event itself.  ANNETTA: So what do you think are some of the key factors that kind of play into when a city bids for an event, you know, like where do you think the spark comes from that someone goes: Why don't we try and run the Olympics?  DANIEL: I think there can be lots of things. And I think one of the things you say is there are factors that come into play. Some of it should and some of it shouldn't, but they come into play. I think you have to accept that for certain people, for certain organizations, these events are massive money makers, they are massive opportunities for certain people in certain types of business. So you often have very prominent figures within the local region thinking, well, if we could bring this in it will create investment in construction, will produce investment in tourism, or produce investment in hospitality or produce investment in all these different areas. So you often have that as a heavy area and a lot of places all over the world very much linked to a city or a country’s ‘sense of place’, and trying to position themselves within the world on a global scale, something like the Olympics, if you think about some of the countries that have hosted the Olympics in recent years, China or Brazil, for example.  That's very much been about making a statement about being a world player. So there's a bit of statesmanship involved, but a lot of smaller events and particularly smaller cities and smaller national events like the City of Culture, often local authorities, local politicians will see it as an opportunity to drive regenera

Episode Notes Speaking with host Annetta Latham on today's podcast is Ken Lum, internationally recognized artist and curator, Guggenheim Fellow and an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Episode Notes Join Annetta Latham as she speaks with Ernesto Ottone, Assistant Director-General for Culture of UNESCO.

Episode Notes Nancy Duxbury, Senior Researcher and Co-coordinator of the Cities, Cultures and Architecture Research Group at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, joins host Annetta Latham to discuss Cultural Mapping and Creative Tourism

Episode Notes Join Katrina as she chats with Terry Wickham, festival producer for the Edmonton Folk Music Festival.

Episode Notes Lending his voice to today's podcast is Simon Brault, CEO of the Canada Council for the Arts.

Episode Notes Sanjay Shahani, executive director of Edmonton Arts Council, joins host Annetta Latham to discuss the world of arts and culture.

Episode Notes Join Annetta as she welcomes Sheri Somerville, executive director of Citie Ballet, to discuss audience engagement!

Episode Notes Our guest for this episode is Edmontonian and member of Thunderchild First Nations, Miranda Jimmy.