Cultural entrepreneurship: What matters? Insights from around the world

What matters in cultural entrepreneurship? What could we learn from practices across borders?

By reflecting on inspiring stories from across the globe and spanning the spectrum of formality and informality, this masterclass will help students and potential cultural entrepreneurs think about and navigate factors of success which are often missed, including authenticity, community relevance, networking, collaboration, trust and leadership. 

What matters for cultural entrepreneurs are the unique stories that inspire people to purchase the product or service and the availability of soft and hard infrastructure that support robust cultural economies.

This spectrum has universal significance in relation to the precarious nature of careers, the fast-paced, fluid environments in which companies operate, and the patchwork of contract, self-employment and enterprise development experienced by creative entrepreneurs in the global labour market. This analysis draws on experiences from diverse countries such as Brazil, Czech Republic, China, Colombia, Egypt, Indonesia, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Peru and South Africa.

The session is moderated by Sunitha Janamohanan.

About the speaker

Avril Joffe is an associate researcher and UNESCO Chair in Cultural Entrepreneurship and Policy in the Cultural Policy and Management Department at the Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She is an economic sociologist with independent professional research experience in the field of cultural policy, culture and development and the cultural economy.

Avril works at the intersection of academia and practice in fields such as culture in urban life, culture and the cultural economy in realising a just and sustainable development, fairness in international cultural cooperation, decent work and the rights and status of artists and cultural professionals as well as teaching pedagogy for post graduate studies in the cultural economy.

Avril is an active member of UNESCO’s Panel of Experts for Cultural Policy and Governance, the Global Creative Economy Council, the International Cultural Relations Research Alliance and on the external international advisory panel for the Horizon Europe programme IN SITU – Place-based innovation of cultural and creative industries in non-urban areas coordinated by the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.

Recent public research related to inequality includes Informality and the cultural economy in the Global South, the Not a Toolkit for EUNIC’s Fair Collaboration project, Promoting Decent Work for the African Cultural and Creative Economy for the ILO and China’s Institutional Cultural Engagement in Africa for Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen.