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Eleonora Belfiore

Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Loughborough University

I joined Loughborough in May 2016 from the University of Warwick, where I had been working since 2004.

My long-term research interests are focused on the cultural politics of decision-making in the cultural sphere. In particular, I have written about public funding of the arts and the arguments used to justify it in a public policy context, and the way in which cultural policy overlaps with other areas of public policy-making, in particular social and economic development policy.

This range of interests has led me to an in-depth investigation of: the social impact of the arts and its place in cultural policy rhetoric; the notion of the transformative power of the arts that underline the impact discourse, and – more recently, the problem of cultural value, and how it can be articulated and discussed in policy discourse in ways that do not rely on a reductively economic understanding of ‘value’. I am working on a book exploring the struggles for power and symbolic domination that are behind processes for both the formal and informal allocation of cultural value to different forms of creative expression and consumption.

Experience

  • 2016–present
    Professor of Communication and Media Studies, Loughborough University
  • 2004–2016
    Associate Professor of Cultural Policy , University of Warwick