Recognising cultural diversity, participation, value creation and many pathways

Dr Tammy Wong Hulbert & Dr Rimi Khan

Australian Theatre for Young People © Tracey Schramm

How do culturally and racially diverse young people participate in the arts? And how does this participation shape particular kinds of skills, competencies and resources that are produced through arts participation? Studies of arts’ ‘impacts’ too easily aggregate the diverse ways in which the arts are experienced. Claims about the economic value of the arts are expressed crudely in terms of numbers of jobs, contribution to growth or a general sense that the arts ‘regenerates’ communities and economies, but there is often little acknowledgement that the arts are not an inclusive space.

Despite over 40 years of state multicultural policy in Australia, only 10 per cent of professional artists are from a non-English speaking background. At the same time the last few decades of Australian arts policy have seen a shift away from multiculturalism to the more diffuse language of diversity. But this reflects a wider post-racial discourse in Australian politics that is at odds with the highly racialized realities of many artists and arts participants.

In our efforts to understand how young people’s participation in the arts can cultivate 21st century skills, we suggest that diversity can be understood in two ways: as a particular form of value creation, and as a critique of dominant understandings of young people’s education and employment pathways.

Diversity as value creation

This research brings a broad understanding of ‘skills’; it connects economic value with the less tangible kinds of knowledge and competency that arise from arts activity. There is a growing understanding that young people’s cultural and embodied capital are central to their value as economic subjects, for example, as workers in the service economy. But to what extent are these forms of subcultural knowledge and embodiment linked to whiteness? If, as critical race scholars have argued, whiteness itself is a form of capital then what kinds of capital can young people of colour cultivate through arts activity, and how does this translate to economic value?

There is wide recognition that the ability to navigate cultural diversity is a requirement of the 21st century workplace. This raises the question of the extent to which these capacities are inherent to particular kinds of workers, or how they might be cultivated and formalized more broadly. Recent attention to the need for ‘cultural intelligence’, and the related need for skills of cultural brokerage, adaptability, cultural autonomy, leadership and the skills to navigate intersectionality are suggestive of the ways in which micro-creds might give currency to the skills and knowledge of young people of colour. These competencies might also be said to come with particular kinds of criticality – which raises the question of how we might value, for example, the ability to challenge structural racism. How might these critical orientations be understood as part of the value of diversity?

Recognising diverse pathways

The notion of ‘pathways’ into employment and education normalises particular kinds of life trajectories. Youth studies scholars have critiqued these benchmarks of independence and mobility as racialised indicators specific to the experiences of white youth (Idriss et al 2021). In this project foregrounding the experiences of racially and culturally diverse young people through the development of micro-creds can help to decentre this white youthful subject. By investigating the aspirations, knowledge and experiences of diverse youth this research can play a role in contesting mainstream understandings of what ‘success’ might look like for young people. 

At the same time, such research is still bound by an imperative to speak to the needs of the institutions in which young people seek to learn and work. Developing micro-creds which meaningfully reflect diversity, but which are still institutionally useful, is one of the key challenges of this project. This challenge has arguably long been part of youth arts projects which have historically been about providing alternatives to mainstream pathways. However, youth arts are also marked by a contradiction – between resisting normative pathways, and being implicated in a professionalization of the arts which potentially carries with it narrow understandings of success. The question for us – as researchers, policymakers and practitioners – is what we can we learn from diverse young people. How do diverse bodies receive and translate arts experiences in different ways, and how might these translate into critical, reflexive or expansive understandings of value, success or achievement that can help to push back against the increasingly prescriptive, neoliberal contexts in which young people live and work.

References

Throsby, D. and Petetskaya, K., 2017. Making art work: an economic study of professional artists in Australia. Australia Council, Surry Hills. Available: https://australiacouncil.gov.au/advocacy-and-research/making-art-work/

Idriss, S., Butler, R. and Harris, A., 2021. Interrogating race, unsettling whiteness: concepts of transitions, enterprise and mobilities in Australian youth studies. Journal of Youth Studies, pp.1-17.