Upcoming Events
To be notified of events and publications:
Campus parking information:
View the map and look for lots marked "V" for visitor.
Note also that parking along the Midway Plaisance is free, though scarce.
Sign up for emails to be notified about the schedule for next academic year, starting in September.
Recent Events
Spring Workshop Series: New Media and Evolving Cultural Networks
Archaeological Resources and Cultural Policy: On the Ground in Chicago
Rebecca S. Graff, Earl S. Johnson Instructor, Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago
Tuesday, May 15, 12:00-1:20 p.m.
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 East 60th St.
Room 289B
How do cultural policy makers in American cities understand their archaeological resources, and why does Chicago diverge from this pattern? After briefly looking at the results of recent archaeological excavations at Chicago's Jackson Park, the former site of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and excavations at the Charnely-Persky House, a 19th-century home designed by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright on Chicago's Gold Coast, this talk will focus on the ways that Chicago's rich archaeological heritage can be integrated more effectively into cultural policy initiatives and into the public sphere.
Rebecca S. Graff obtained her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2011. She holds a BA in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Graff is a historical archaeologist, who completed her dissertation, The Vanishing City: Time, Tourism, and the Archaeology of Event in Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and currently teaches as an Earl S. Johnson Instructor in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences Program (MAPSS). She has directed several archaeological excavations in Chicago, most recently at the Louis Sullivan-designed Charnley-Persky House. Her recent article, "Being Toured While Digging Tourism: Excavating the Familiar at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition," appears in the International Journal of Historical Archaeology. Graff's areas of specialization include 19th- and 20th-century urban archaeology, memory and material culture, and the relationship between temporality and modernity.
Kickstarter: Bring your Creative Idea To Life
Stephanie Pereira, Director, Art Program at Kickstarter
Tuesday, May 1, 12:00-1:20 p.m.
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 East 60th St.
Room 289B
Kickstarter is the world's largest funding platform for creative projects. Every week on Kickstarter, tens of thousands of people pledge millions of dollars and help bring to life creative projects from the worlds of music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. The Kickstarter community features projects by Oscar winners, Grammy winners, TED Fellows, New York Times best-sellers, Pulitzer Prize finalists, and thousands of others. Kickstarter is open to creative projects big and small, serious and whimsical, traditional and avant-garde. Kickstarter's Art Program Director Stephanie Pereira will present examples of interesting Kickstarter projects and provide tips on how to structure a successful project. Bring your questions about Kickstarter's policies, processes, and evolving role on the national arts funding scene.
Stephanie Pereira has spent the last 10 years working with artists and arts organizations to catalyze creative communities through both on- and offline engagement. Stephanie previously served as Associate Director, Learning & Engagement at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, a non-profit residency center in New York City. She holds an MA in Arts Administration from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BFA in Visual Art from Rutgers University.
New Opportunities, Old Barriers? Variation in Online Creative Expression
Eszter Hargittai, Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University
Tuesday, April 24, 12:00-1:20 p.m.
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 East 60th St.
Room 289B
Recent developments have made it increasingly possible for people to make available their creative output to a worldwide audience. No longer must one have large budgets to finance production and the necessary influence to get past gatekeepers when attempting to share one's opinion beyond one's immediate social circles. While eyeballs for viewership are not guaranteed, the prospect of reaching large audiences is more within the realm of possibilities than in earlier times. Does the availability of such opportunities lead to widespread participation? This presentation draws on unique longitudinal data about a diverse group of young adults' online activities to examine the prevalence of content creation and sharing in the digital age. To what extent are new opportunities being used and what may explain variation in participation among different people? Findings suggest that users' demographic and socioeconomic background, the context of their uses and their Internet skills are related to active online engagement. The talk will explore the implications of these findings.
Eszter Hargittai is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project. She is also Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She received her PhD in Sociology from Princeton University. Her research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media with a particular interest in how differences in people's Web-use skills influence what they do online. She is editor of Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have (University of Michigan Press 2009). Her work has received awards from several organizations and regularly receives coverage in the popular press.
For more information, see eszter.com and webuse.org .
Alternate Realities: Digital Games and the Culture of Transmedia Play
Patrick Jagoda, Mellon postdoctoral fellow of new media and soon to be Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago
Tuesday, April 17, 12:00-1:20 p.m.
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 East 60th St.
Room 289B
Since the 1980s, digital games have started to blossom into a significant cultural form. Alongside the proliferation of mainstream gaming genres such as First-Person Shooter, Real-Time Strategy, and Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, a more experimental form has emerged over the last decade: Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). Many of these games, including Microsoft's The Beast and 42 Entertainment's I Love Bees, function as collaborative experiences that use the real world as a platform, blurring the lines between games and reality. To accomplish this fusion, such games incorporate a wide breadth of everyday media types, including laptops and cell phones. In ARGs, players interact directly with characters, solve plot-based puzzles to advance the narrative, and build a collaborative community to coordinate real-life and online activities. While considerable research has focused on mainstream video games and virtual worlds, transmedia design suggests another major innovative direction that collective storytelling and digital gaming promise to take in the coming years. In this presentation, I explore the facets of this cultural form and discuss several ARG projects that I have directed.
Patrick Jagoda is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow of new media and soon to be Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago. He is also a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. In recent years, he has worked on projects in the fields of new media learning, digital storytelling, and transmedia game design.
UPDATE: Check out the trailer for Prof. Jagoda's upcoming transmedia game.
Making Laughs: Exploring Social Networks from Second City, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Screen
Libby Hemphill, Assistant Professor of Communication and Information Studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology
Tuesday, April 10, 12:00-1:20 p.m.
Harris School of Public Policy Studies
1155 East 60th St.
Room 289B
Chicago's Second City has a long history of producing comedy superstars, many of whom followed alums John Belushi, Dan Aykyrod, and Gilda Radner to NBC's Saturday Night Live (SNL). SNL alums, in turn, have also gone on to large screen success. Mike Myers, Tina Fey, and Steve Carrell are just a few of the recent Second City and SNL alums to enjoy such success. In this talk, I'll use the casts of the Second City Chicago and Saturday Night Live to examine the role of social networks in the production of comedy. Actors and their networks are often used to illustrate network phenomena such as "small worlds" or as fodder for party games such as "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". In this talk, we'll look specifically at comedy actors and explore whether their associations in one area (e.g., on stage) impact their associations or success in another (e.g., Hollywood).
Libby Hemphill is an Assistant Professor of Communication and Information Studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She studies social media and collaboration and often relies on film and television to help her teach courses on social networks and communication. She is especially interested in the role of social media in public discourse, particularly among elected officials. She graduated from the University of Chicago in 2001 and earned her M.S. and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. She was a visiting scholar in the Arizona State University College of Public Programs before returning to Chicago in 2010.
Fall Workshop Series: City Cultural Planning
Michael C. Dorf on the original Chicago Cultural Plan; Alan Brown on "creative capital"; Alan Freeman on the evidence base for city cultural planning; Robert Bruegmann on patterns in urban growth; Carl Grodach on the cultural policy of Austin, Texas; and Jonathan Vickery on cultural policy in an age of scarcity.
View details and video
Winter Workshop Series: City Cultural Planning continued
Drew Williams-Clark on mapping regional cultural indicators; Monika De Frantz on reconstructing contemporary Europe in Vienna and Berlin; Lawrence Rothfield on measuring the cultural vitality of scenes; Daniel Silver on cultural mapping; Eleonora Redaelli on authentic participation using GIS; and Ann Markusen and Anne Gadwa Nicodemus on creative placemaking.
View details and video
Teaching Artists and the Future of Education — panel & community forum
WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 15, 2012
6:15 PM - 9:00 PM
FILM ROW, COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO
1104 S. WABASH, 8th floor
Teaching Artists, hybrid professionals who link the arts to education and community life, are redefining the roles that the arts can play in public education. Who are teaching artists? Where and how do they work? What new strategies might they offer to help ailing public schools? And how can schools become generative sites of creative growth for artists, teachers and students?
A new national study of teaching artists shows that their work in schools is already providing answers to these questions. Join us for the first Chicago presentation of the Teaching Artist Research Project, a study of teaching artists and their work in a dozen cities, including Chicago.
PRESENTER:
Nick Rabkin is a research affiliate of the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, and the principal investigator of the Teaching Artist Research Project at NORC at the University of Chicago. He teaches cultural policy at Columbia College Chicago.
RESPONDENTS:
Jessica Hudson, Independent Performance Artist/Teaching Artist
Cecil McDonald, Jr., Photographer/Teaching Artist, Columbia College Chicago
Mario Rossero, Director of the Office of Arts Education, Chicago Public Schools
Dr. Margaret Beale Spencer, The Marshall Field IV Professor of Urban Education, University of Chicago
Reception will follow program. Click here to register.
This forum is presented by the Teaching Artist Development (TAD) Studio at CCAP. For more information about TAD Studio, go to colum.edu/tadstudio. Funding for this colloquium was made possible by support from the Lloyd A. Fry Foundation, JPMorgan Chase Foundation, the Cultural Policy Center, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, and NORC at the University of Chicago.
Sponsored by: Center for Community Arts Partnerships (CCAP) at Columbia College Chicago; the Cultural Policy Center, Harris School of Public Policy Studies, and NORC at the University of Chicago; and Ingenuity, Inc.
Future of the City: The Arts Symposium
June 7, 2011
Chicago Cultural Center
Co-hosted with the National Endowment for the Arts and the University of Chicago's Office of Civic Engagement.
The University of Chicago presents Future of the City: The Arts Symposium, a one-day gathering of leaders who are shaping the cultural landscape of Chicago and beyond.
Arts and culture are proving their power as economic and social catalysts for the creative transformation of cities. Strategic collaborations between government, businesses, foundations and academic sectors have helped to rejuvenate neighborhoods, inspire civic and community engagement, and incubate the next generation of creative entrepreneurs. We will explore these themes, related research, and public policies as they apply to Chicago and other urban centers.
David Simon and Wendell Pierce (The Wire and Treme) will hold a special lunch-time conversation during a day full of discussions between internationally recognized researchers, artists, academics, and civic leaders.
John Holden, author of Capturing Cultural Value: How Culture Has Become a Tool of Government Policy, will provide introductory remarks to expert panelists discussing how cultural policies and arts practices around the world are evolving as individuals, organizations, and cities adjust to social changes, technological advances and economic uncertainty.
Emerging Practice Seminar
April 29, 8:30 a.m.-4:45 p.m.
University of Chicago Gleacher Center
450 N. Cityfront Plaza Dr., Chicago, IL 60611
This event was hosted by CultureLab, a new joint initiative between the Cultural Policy Center at the University of Chicago, and a consortium of leading arts consultants from the U.S., U.K., and Australia. CultureLab's Emerging Practice Seminar is a concerted effort to bring forward promising new practices in the cultural sector and transmit them to the field.
Each year, two practice areas are selected that represent important developments for the arts field. This year’s program focused on:
- Uses of technology in audience engagement
- Revenue management and dynamic pricing
The discussion of each topic featured several case studies drawn from arts organizations from Chicago to Sydney.
Also, a lunchtime session will include a live debate on the role of mobile devices in theaters and museums, featuring Martha Lavey, artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre Company, and Alan Brown, Principal at WolfBrown.
Click here to see the presentations.
Spring 2011 Workshop Series: Intellectual Property and the Arts
Adrian Johns on the history and politics of policing intellectual property; Gordon Quinn on Fair Use and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; David Beeman on constitutional boundaries of intellectual property law; Douglas Noonan on historic preservation policy in Chicago; Julia Rhoads on dance and intellectual property; William Landes and Anthony Hirschel on copyright and appropriation art; and Carole Rosenstein with a national study of outdoor arts festivals.
View details and video
View more past events: