Events & Festivals Research, UK Centre for Events Management

Dr Dave O'Brien has been seconded to the UK's Department for Culture Media and Sport for six months, as part of an ESRC/AHRC public policy placement fellowship. The ESRC, AHRC and DCMS have provided funding worth just over £36,000, as part of a wider scheme to allow early career researchers to work with public institutions on pressing questions facing British society in the twenty-first century. Dave will be working on a project called ‘measuring cultural value’, which involves developing methods to understand how people value culture. The fellowship will engage academics, policymakers, practitioners and other stakeholders to understand a range of approaches to measuring value and represents an important contribution to contemporary debates on cultural policy and funding for culture. This research will have several impacts for government, academics and practitioners from the cultural sector. For government the impact will improve the methods used to measure cultural value, whilst arts and cultural practitioners, as well as academics, will be interested in how the government understands, and gathers data on, the value of culture in contemporary Britain.