On the evening of 18 September 2014, Elodie Bordat from Sciences Po Aix-en-Provence in France was announced as the winner of the 2014 ENCATC Cultural Policy and Cultural Management Research Award for her outstanding PhD Thesis “The Dynamics of Changes in Public Policy. A Comparative Historical Analysis of Mexican and Argentine Cultural Policies”.
The ceremony to bestow the ENCATC Award for the best recent PhD Thesis on comparative cultural policies or management topics presented by a young researcher was held in Brno, Czech Republic and organised in the framework of the 22nd ENCATC Annual Conference “New Challenges for Arts and Culture: Is it just about money?” (17-19 September 2014). In attendance were the Award’s international jury and two members of the Award’s Steering Committee: Anupama Sekhar, Acting/Deputy Director of the Culture Department at the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF), and Alan Salzenstein, President of the Association of Arts Administration Educators (AAAE). Also in the audience were researchers, academics, arts and culture professionals, policy makers, artists and students from Europe, North and South America, and Asia.
On behalf of the Award’s international jury Annick Schramme, President of ENCATC and President of the ENCATC Award jury said: “The jury selected the winning PhD Thesis for its solid theoretical approach and methodological awareness, strong comparative perspective, and original topic. Furthermore, the jury believes Elodie Bordat’s unique and interesting research will contribute to new cultural policy orientations and be applicable for both practitioners and scholars.”
“The relevance of the Elodie Bordat’s PhD thesis encompasses policy, practical and political aspects. This work is extremely important for advancing the debate in the field of heritage cultural policy in Latin America and it offers future researchers and academics an impressive bibliography on cultural policy and beyond,” said ENCATC Secretary General, GiannaLia Cogliandro Beyens.
The ENCATC Award exists to stimulate academic research in the field of cultural policy and management to explore, through comparative and cross-cultural research, issues at stake in contemporary Europe, Asia and the Americas, and possibly anticipate new cultural policy orientations. Moreover, it will to contribute to the process of creating an “infrastructure”, a network of scholars who are competent in doing comparative research projects in cultural policy and management issues. The winning PhD thesis will be translated into English and published in the 2015 ENCATC Book Series produced by the international publishing house Peter Lang.
IGCAT supports the CPRA awards and has edited the work of Claire Bullen (European Capitals of Culture and Everyday Cultural Diversity: A Comparison of Liverpool (UK) and Marseille (France)) and Aleksandar Brkić (Cultural policy frameworks (re)constructing national and supranational identities: The Balkans and the European Union). IGCAT is currently editing Christiaan de Beukelaer’s work, who is the 2012 CPRA winner.