How do the Turner Prize and comparable exhibitions impact arts ecologies and organizational partnerships outside London?

The aim of this project is to conduct a study on arts ecologies to investigate how individuals and organizations within a geographical area are impacted by a cultural event, such as the Turner Prize or a comparable exhibition. It will focus on how such people and groups experience and talk about activities, connections and partnership activity, in their local area and in their own words. The condition ‘outside London’ speaks to the importance of arts development nationwide, and the role of large cultural organisations whose collections, expertise and exhibitions may travel to other regions. The objectives are to collect new data from individuals and organisations in a sample of locations in the UK, via interviews and participatory methods, to use this ‘emic’ perspective to develop a new framework, and to produce outputs which both contribute to current research on networking in the creative industries and to stimulate discussions about evolving partnership practices in the creative sector. With this in mind, the term ‘arts ecology’ can be characterised as a provisional ‘sensitising concept’, to be tested against the actual experiences gleaned from participants. Studies of networks within the art world tend to have examined associative network effects within the art market – e.g. on artists of being connected to other artists (Braden and Teekins, 2019) and the power of art fairs (Morgner, 2014). As far as we can discern, despite government emphasis on, and monitoring of, national museums partnership activities, there has been no previous academic study which analyses the relationships which are generated between a network of museums, media organisations, galleries, heritage organisations, community groups and arts organisations, and individual artists, as they become involved in non-commercially driven partnership activities. We expect that the student will begin with some 'scoping' interviews with a small set of individuals from the last 10 years as part of contextual review and to assess the feasibility of getting reasonable data for historic exhibitions. Notable emphasis has been placed Eastbourne (2023) and Bradford (2025) with the reasonable expectation that richer, more recent data would be available. Given the nature of this opportunity, we expect the decisions on the sample, methods and theoretical/analytic frame to be determined by the doctoral student in the initial stages of the research, and in conjunction with other planned National Partnerships activity in Eastbourne. The project will have to deal with very different regional situations and the challenge of how distant in time the Turner Prize has been, spanning over a decade. .