"This thesis, which is in the interdisciplinary realm of service studies, addresses current debates in different disciplines, including arts and cultural sociology, urban cultural studies, and cultural policy studies", Nehl writes in her thesis.
She will be the first within the research group Culture and Creativity to defend her thesis. Her supervisors are associate professor Katja Lindqvist and Friederike Landau-Donnelly.
The defence is on the 19th of November at Campus Helsingborg.
About the dissertation
Independent cultural production does not happen in a vacuum and a closer look reveals that independent cultural actors work hard for the idea(l) of independence: They organise in social networks at the neighbourhood level and beyond, they search and secure alternative funding, and engage in urban politics to make sure they have a venue. In these seemingly mundane processes, the thesis intervenes by introducing the concept of infrastructuring, to not only shed new light on known struggles (difficult and insecure working conditions) but to provide orientation in a politically shifting Europe.
Through four papers, the thesis shows that independent actors always infrastructure alongside their day to day work – either because they can or because they have to – whereby service-entanglements, friendships and cultural political ideas arise and settle, which benefit not only those organisations who produce them, but independent cultural producers broadly.
Empirically, the thesis explores infrastructuring practices in a Sweden-based recent neighbourhood cultural work space, and a European cultural network organisation, with four decades of experience as an advocate for independent cultural centres. Both cases ultimately underline the importance of people's continuous activities and the ill-fitting project-timed structures in the cultural sector.
While the work emphasises the value and social relevance of independent cultural production in particular, it also highlights how fragile the arrangements of people-driven and maintained cultural infrastructure are, and that we should not take them for granted, despite their seeming resilience. Infrastructuring independent cultural production is a forward looking account of cultural producers' ways of self-organising and policy-making in the times we are in.
