Sustainable cultural development

This unit seeks to equip you with knowledge, skills and intercultural competences to explore the relationship between cultural production and consumption and new agendas for sustainable economic and social development at an international level. It evaluates policy and practice outside the global North, metropolitan cultures and industrial determinants (eg off-grid, DIY modes of creativity). The unity takes a cultural economy approach to encompass the broad range of cultural /creative industries, arts and traditional cultural practices and products, handicraft and forms of manufacture. These are situated as economic practices embedded in wider social and cultural contexts - local, national and global. Through an interdisciplinary and practice-based approach, we examine how cultural economies might be used to provide employment, strengthen identity and resilience and point to more sustainable, less volatile and dependent growth for developing cultures.