In this essay, historian Mark Stern uses the metaphor of “the tragedy of the commons” to reflect on the rewards and frustrations of conducting research on the social and community impacts of the arts. He suggests that thinking about community culture as a “field”—rather than as a collection of individual programs—might prevent the logic of the commons from killing the many benefits the arts and culture can bring to communities and their residents.
This 2009 report is the product of SIAP’s collaboration with the Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC) on a plan to document TPAC’s impact on civic engagement in Tucson and Pima County, Arizona. The goal of the project was to develop a plan to enable TPAC to phase in systematic collection and analysis of data on various forms of engagement. The report begins with a review of the policy context in which the project was undertaken, including the findings of the Pima Cultural Plan. The report then discusses a strategy and recommendations for documenting civic engagement and outlines a staged implementation plan. Specifically, Stern and Seifert propose five strategies: improving organizational data gathering, telling stories, documenting artists and the informal cultural sector, identifying institutional networks, and using geographic information systems to integrate data for analysis.
During 2008, SIAP collaborated with the Americans for the Arts’ Animating Democracy project on a review of the literature on civic engagement and the arts. Based on that review, SIAP considered the theoretical and methodological issues and developed a comprehensive strategy by which policymakers, researchers, and practitioners could improve evidence and advance understanding of the civic impact of the arts and culture. This field guide walks through SIAP's rationale and methods for a multi-level data gathering strategy toward that end.
This report focuses on one aspect of the social impact of the arts--their influence on civic engagement. The inquiry was undertaken during 2008 in collaboration with Animating Democracy, a program of Americans for the Arts. The purpose was to assess the state of knowledge about the relationship of the arts to civic engagement and to suggest ways that artists, cultural and community organizations, philanthropists, and public agencies could improve the quality of that knowledge. The approach was a review of literature drawn from the social sciences, the humanities, and public policy in an attempt to bridge theory with practice and research with evaluation. The authors structure the report as a conventional research design--that is, they define terms, conceptualize relationships among variables, identify methodological challenges, and assess data gathering strategies. Lastly, they propose a three-tier approach--with organizational or program-scale strategies, regional-scale strategies, and initiative-scale strategies--to improve the field's ability to document and understand the impact of the arts and culture on civil society.