“Digital Transformation and Cultural Policies : A European Perspective”

The lecture will focus on the main question – what happens when cultural policy turns digital, that is, what happens when cultural policy gets changed and challenged by digital culture? The presentation will outline key findings of the multi-disciplinary comparative analysis of different digital cultural policies from seven European countries (UK, Germany, Croatia, Sweden, Spain, Norway, and Switzerland) as well as the analysis of EU digital cultural policy. It will show the hyperconvergent nature of digital cultural policies; they contain established ideas of cultural policy – such as democratization, welfare, access, and national, protectionist ideas – brought together within a digital framework, while also adding new cultural policy tools and instruments, such as digital standards, international regulations, directives, etc. By providing different examples from policy and practice in Europe, the lecture will show how digital cultural policies are works in progress, struggling to align their aspirations with their effectiveness.

The presentation will be based on the key insights from the edited volume Digital Transformation and Cultural Policies in Europe (edited by Ole Marius Hylland and Jaka Primorac), published in November 2023 by Routledge and available as open access book at the following link.

Jaka Primorac works as a Scientific Advisor at the Department for Culture and Communication, Institute for Development and International Relations (IRMO), Zagreb, Croatia. She holds a PhD (2010) in Sociology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Her research interests intersect the fields of sociology of culture, sociology of media and communications and sociology of work. Her work is centered on the relationship between culture and economy, with the particular focus on cultural and creative labour issues and implications for cultural and media policies. Jaka Primorac collaborated on a number of research projects in Croatia and abroad – from participation at different European Union funded projects (Horizon, COST, FP7) to cultural policy expertise for European Parliament, UNESCO, World Bank, etc. Currently she is the project coordinator of the Croatian team on a large-scale European Union project on film industry in small European countries (CresCine). Her work has been published in international and domestic scientific journals such as Cultural Trends, International Journal for Cultural Policy, Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (FQS). Her latest authored book is From Project to Project: Work and Employment in the Cultural Sector (2021), while the last co-edited volume (with Ole Marius Hylland) is Digital Transformation and Cultural Policies in Europe (2023).