Arts & International Affairs: Volume 3, Issue 1, Spring 2018 | Page 36

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS • VOLUME 3, ISSUE 1 • SPRING 2018
THE ARTS, PARTICIPATION, AND GLOBAL INTERESTS
J.P. SINGH
University of Edinburgh
GUY GOTTO
Documentarian
ZACH MARSCHALL
George Mason University
IICR GLOBAL CULTURAL FELLOWS
Can participatory deliberations motivated by the arts help us understand ourselves?
Thirty-three Global Cultural Fellows appointed through the Institute for International
Cultural Relations (IICR) during 2017–18 explored “cultural interests and values.”
Their deliberations, reported below, included a week of intensive activities during
the world-famous Edinburgh festivals in August 2017. The Fellows attended pre-selected
events at the festivals, as well as structured deliberations at the University of Edinburgh.
Cultural conversations, rooted in participatory research techniques, used to explore the
creation, contestation and choices around our cultural interests and values.
The 70 th anniversary of the birth of the festival city of Edinburgh in 1947 offered an important
opportunity to explore the cultural values that created one of the largest annual
cultural interactions in human history. The global values that informed the creation of
the festival resulted from the vision of a few individuals and were fostered through a
network of global and national institutions. Broadly, they reflected the Enlightenment
Project with an optimistic view of learning from human interactions. Seventy years after
the launch of the festivals, we ask ourselves how far we have come in terms of tolerance,
understanding, and respect, as well as in the spirit of universalism.
This essay republishes the blog entries on the IICR website accompanying each day’s
deliberation in August 2017. The Fellows’ deliberations were sub-divided into seven key
themes relating to Cultural Interests and Values. Preliminary reflections from each fellow
and faculty coordinators around these themes were published in Arts and International
Affairs, Volume 2 Issue 2.
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doi: 10.18278/aia.3.1.4