Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Agenda Overview |
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Symposium
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dialoguing@rts – Advancing Cultural Literacy for Social Inclusion through Dialogical Arts Education This 90-minute symposium, in an empty chair format, will present and discuss findings from the Horizon Europe project dialoguing@rts, which explores how performing arts education can foster inclusion and contribute to social cohesion by enhancing cultural literacy. The project spans Norway, Finland, Germany, Italy, Serbia, Uganda, and Aotearoa New Zealand, engaging participants of all ages and roles, especially in schools and community arts. In Work Package 2, an assessment framework for cultural literacy education has been developed which is now used for a quantitative large-scale survey in 5 European and 2 non-European countries. For the development of the framework, we conducted a participatory approach, also facing questions of decolonizing quantitative research. Work Package 3 investigates how performing arts education creates spaces for cultural literacy and social inclusion. Through ethnographic case studies across Norway, Italy, Serbia, and Germany, WP3 identifies both drivers and constraints in current practices. Adopting a critical participatory research approach, Work Package 4 realized artistic interventions through participation-oriented residencies, including one in a disadvantaged neighborhood in Ulm. These residencies aim to foster social cohesion by engaging communities in collaborative performing arts practices. Competence portfolios were developed to capture both individual and collective transformative learning. By situating these findings within postcolonial perspectives and broader debates on diversity, social (in)justice, and democratic participation, the symposium will reflect on how performing arts education can strengthen inclusion and social cohesion. The comparative view highlights opportunities offered by dialogical approaches Presentations of the Symposium Cultural literacy education: Challenges of a postcolonial large-scale study approach Within the Horizon Europe project dialoguing@rts, Work Package 2 examines the characteristics and implementation of cultural literacy education (CLE) in five European and two non-European countries through a large-scale study. Given the country-specific contexts, quantitative instruments in this field must be adapted to ensure that findings accurately reflect diverse cultural and educational practices. Following a postcolonial perspective, we implemented various measures to decolonise both (a) our research instruments and methods and (b) our research reporting. These efforts may, at times, stand in tension with policymakers’ expectations regarding the design, comparability, and outcomes of large-scale studies. This presentation will first outline the challenges of developing an adequate survey instrument and provide insight into the participatory approach used for this purpose. It will then introduce selected components of the assessment framework and critically reflect on our strategies for conducting decolonised research. In doing so, we aim to stimulate discussion on how large-scale comparative studies can remain methodologically robust while respecting epistemic diversity and local educational practices. Ethnographies in Dialogue: Case Studies on Performative Artistic Practices Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and document analysis, we examine how performative artistic practices can open up spaces for social inclusion, as well as the drivers and constraints associated with these processes. A central focus of this contribution is the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz. We analyse how efforts to diversify personnel and repertoire interact with entrenched organisational norms and traditional concert formats. The transcultural ensemble Colourage and a transcultural Orchestra Academy were established within the concert hall as experimental spaces for institutional transformation and potential catalysts for change. However, our findings also reveal structural limits. While such protected experimental spaces enable innovation by allowing musicians to negotiate transcultural musical practices, sustainable institutional transformation requires long-term structural anchoring within the organisation’s normative and regulative frameworks. From a Nordic perspective, the contribution is extended through an ethnographic analysis of social inclusion in performing arts education for children and young people across diverse institutional and community contexts. Drawing on WP3 cases from Huldance, a community-based hip hop dance studio in Verdal (Norway), compulsory schools in Trondheim (Norway) and Kokkola (Finland), Fargespill (Norway), and the Council for Municipal Schools of Arts (Norway), the analysis explores how participation and belonging are enabled, negotiated, and constrained by aesthetic norms, pedagogical choices, and structural conditions. Inclusion is thus approached not as a fixed or self-evident goal, but as a situated and relational process shaped by tensions between access, artistic integrity, and the risk of new forms of exclusion within arts education practices. Shaping Space: Participatory Artistic Residencies and Cultural Literacy in Practice Within the Horizon Europe project dialoguing@rts, Work Package 4 explores participatory artistic residencies as spaces for dialogical exchange and community-based research. This presentation focuses on the case study in the city of Ulm, southern Germany, where two artistic residencies (September 2025 and February 2026) were realised in cooperation with Krealab e.V. and the City of Ulm’s Department of Culture. As part of the project, a new neighbourhood creative space was established to enable low-threshold participation and local engagement. The residencies combined community music, sound art, and experimental music practices to foster encounters across social and cultural differences. Participatory formats such as sound walks, collaborative sound installations, and improvisational sessions encouraged embodied engagement and led to the emergence of a self-organised weekly open jam session. Alongside artistic activities, participants developed individual portfolios reflecting cultural literacy competencies within the project’s research framework. The presentation critically examines the implementation process, addressing the development of participation, evolving local structures, and tensions between (predefined) research designs and open-ended artistic practice. The Ulm case raises broader questions of sustainability and the long-term potential of participatory artistic research. | ||