Accessibility, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Cultural Sector

In this first chapter of the book, we present our perspective of the cultural sector along with the terminological choices we have made. Subsequently, we provide a brief literature review on issues of accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI) in the cultural sector. Finally, we outline the structure of the book, which is divided into five sections. The first four sections group chapters that discuss ADEI initiatives in specific sectors. The first section focuses on the performing arts sector and includes three chapters presenting cases from a theater, the opera sector, and a dance organization. The second section delves into the music sector, with four chapters covering cases from an orchestra, the electronic music sector, musicians from South Africa, and hip hop in Haiti. The third section comprises three chapters presenting cases from the visual arts sector, including Canadian and Chilean museums and a cultural organization. The fourth section explores the events sector, presenting three chapters, two of which discuss festivals and one focuses on the Super Bowl. The final section presents two chapters not tied to a specific discipline. The first chapter shares an experience of teaching ADEI in art in Taiwan, while the second chapter deals with policies related to ADEI from a federal cultural administration in Canada.

As part of the accessibility, diversity, equity and inclusion (ADEI) conceptual umbrella, how accessibility is envisioned and requires increasingly greater attention and involvement from both cultural managers and audiences of inclusive arts organizations? But what is the scope of an accessibility management plan? What exactly does an accessibility plan include, and how do cultural institutions engage with accessibility requirements today? Such questions drive this chapter, illustrated by the case of Teatro Villa Mayor, located in Bogota. Since this cultural institution opened in 2000, its goal has been to “bring people together around shows of quality and diversity that make the theater a symbol of the city.” In 2016, the city approved a new managerial plan for this facility. In response, Teatro Villa Mayor implemented a three-part management strategy for its teams, outlined in this chapter. First, the “Mindset” phase redefined this place as a cultural institution accessible by not one but multiple communities. Second, the “Possibility and capacity” phase activated awareness and training to prepare the theater to be able to receive any kind of event. Third, the “Productive learning” phase encouraged concrete actions to design, implement, and promote new experiences for the audiences. By detailing the strategic changes and evaluation measures adopted by the Teatro Villa Mayor to sustain accessibility, the positive results from accessibility management in cultural industries, such as an increased capacity to organize more events and to welcome new participants, can be discussed.

Though scholarship has documented Black opera leaders' contributions to the art form in the United States (André, 2018; Caplan, 2017; Cuyler, 2021; Southern, 1997; Turner, 2015), they have received scant attention in rubrics that theorize a definition of Black opera (André, 2018; Cheatham, 1997; Schmidt & Schroeder, 1999). However, as their recent advocacy for racial justice (Cuyler, 2022) through their Letter to the Opera Field in 2020 revealed (Cuyler, 2023), Black opera leaders play a powerful and unique role in shaping audiences' appreciation, engagement with, and understanding of Black opera (André, 2018; Cuyler, 2023; Floyd & Cuyler, 2023). In addition to their positionality as observers of and participants in opera companies' decision-making processes, their advocacy for racial justice can compel an opera company to program Black opera, or not (Cuyler, 2021, 2022, 2023). Therefore, in this chapter, I explore the research question, what is the role of Black opera leaders in Black opera? Lastly, I propose a theory of the dynamic process that includes artistic programming and casting, hiring, community engagement, and audience development which enables the development of an audience for Black opera when Black opera leaders view their leadership of these areas of work through the lens of racial justice.

In Canada today, Francophone minority communities (FMCs) outside Québec exist in every province and territory and cross all sectors of Canadian Francophonie (French-Canadians, Francophone immigrants, Francophone Métis as well as Francophile anglophones). Besides their linguistic immersion in primary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions, these Francophones living outside Quebec counter linguistic assimilation and affirm their place in Canada's bilingual and multicultural society through their cultural productions (music, theatre, dance, cuisine, literature). In this study, we take up the case of L'Association, La Girandole d’Edmonton, a cultural association dedicated to the teaching and promotion of French-Canadian dance in Edmonton (Alberta) to examine the multiple challenges such organizations face despite the crucial role they play in ensuring the vitality of linguistic minority communities in Canada.

Established in 1906, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) is a cornerstone of Victoria, Australia. Through the shared language of music, it creates meaningful experiences for its audiences, delivered to the highest possible standard. Considered one of Australia's preeminent cultural ambassadors, the MSO performs in Australia and internationally while attracting guest artists from around the world. Annually the MSO engages with more than 5 million people through live concerts, TV, radio and online broadcasts, international and regional tours, recordings, and education programs. In 2021, the MSO launched its digital platform MSO.LIVE engaging with an audience in 58 countries. The pandemic brought many challenges to the Orchestra but also some extraordinary opportunities. Pre-pandemic the MSO board, management, staff, and musicians worked to transform the Orchestra. The many lockdowns created the perfect occasion to redefine the vision. It became an opportunity to transform. Equity and diversity, in a world of classic music where traditionally white men dominate, were identified as the way forward. MSO aspires to lead the way for equality across its Board, staff, and musicians, and throughout its artistic programming. The MSO was the first professional Australian orchestra to join the Keychange movement in early 2020. The MSO is committed to promoting a culture that celebrates and supports the diversity of its people and community. Diversity in its people, its music, and its audience is a specific goal and a plan has been developed to achieve by 2024.

Data from international journals show that woman* and other minorities continue to be drastically underrepresented in the music industry worldwide and in the electronic music industry in Europe, Canada, and Quebec. Recent work focusing on the contributions of female electronic music DJs and producers also testify to the intersectional difficulties they face. In this chapter, we examine the strategies they deploy daily to make a career in an overwhelmingly male environment by studying the case of the Montreal electronic music scene. To do so, we use qualitative interviews and observations using the shadowing technique and we deploy a gender-as-social-practice approach, which focuses on how people practice gender in everyday life by considering gender not as a stable state or characteristic of people, but as a dynamic process performed in interactions that produce difference. Our research, which runs from 2021 to 2025, aims to find explanations for the persistent underrepresentation of women* in the electronic music world. More specifically, our results highlight the strategies and coping mechanisms our participants mobilize to negotiate their place and identity in the electronic music industry, paying particular attention to the collective aspect of their mobilization and to their feminist practices, such as creating solidarity networks.

*People who identify as woman.

While referring to the inability of South Africa (SA) to absorb the large number of new musicians produced by SA universities each year and how South African music practitioners find limited employment opportunities for themselves in SA's cultural sector, a panel member at a musicology symposium in 2011 stated that “we are creating exiles.” The panel member made the statement during dialogue on the state of national higher education level music curricula, whether they were transformed to mirror the needs of the country or not, and what this meant for a contemporary music performance career in SA. Exile is the point of departure of this chapter, where conditions of public and institutional policy during and after apartheid are framed as encouraging the expanded borders of SA musicians. The emphasis is on how exile is a desired economic result especially among Black musicians who have a scarcity-prone SA music marketplace. This chapter also engages with multilevel policy-led interventions of inclusion and diversity that attempt to grow the SA Black music market.

Since its inception in the 1980s, solidarity has been one of the structuring elements of Haitian hip-hop. In this sense, what an artist could not do on his own for lack of financial means, peer groups enable him to achieve. Given Haiti's precarious socioeconomic context, the possibility of mobilizing more friends and colleagues makes it easier to cope with financial worries and other difficulties. Drawing on material from 36 in-depth semi-structured interviews, this chapter examines practices of solidarity and mutual aid in the world of hip-hop in Port-au-Prince. Drawing on Becker's theory of the art world and Soulet's theory of solidarity, this chapter analyzes the artistic practices through which rappers develop forms of solidarity and mutual aid to cope with various financial and social difficulties. I seek to understand the way rappers organize themselves, which can be likened to the Haitian konbit, a form of solidarity that emerged in the aftermath of independence and continues to this day. This study shows that hip-hop strengthens the social bonds between rappers in working-class neighborhoods, where lifestyles are based on solidarity and mutual aid.

Today's museums seek to be more representative of the social diversity of the communities they serve. Their intention is reflected not only in the exhibitions and public programs they offer, but also in the development of their collections and their uses. The colonial origins of the collections and the gaps in the major art historical narratives that have provided their primary interpretations are more widely recognized. Several recent initiatives are revisiting, for inclusion purposes, the principles of exemplarity, uniqueness, internal organization, and material integrity on which acquisition and its valorization were until recently based. This chapter considers current initiatives undertaken over the past 10 years by the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Gallery of Canada, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, in the development and use of their collections. It is done by taking as support three strategies established by Maura Reilly (2018) to foster inclusion in exhibitions. These three strategies – areas of study, revisionism, polylogue – are loosely adapted for collections. The four museums were selected for (1) the interest of their initiatives, (2) the complementarity of these institutions, in terms of collecting scope (contemporary, national, or “encyclopedic”), institutional status (major museums, two provincial, one federal, one nonprofit) and location (in major cities, metropolis, or capital city), and their partnership in the “New Uses of Collections in Art Museums” Partnership (SSHRC 2021–2028) of the CIÉCO Research and Inquiry Group. This portrait, through the collections of four institutions, is paradigmatic of a fundamental transformation in Canadian art museums.

For many predominantly white arts institutions in the United States, the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in the summer of 2020 prompted externally initiated calls for equity work. Many of these organizations crafted equity statements, engaged in trainings, and made public displays of their intent to do different and better – however, many did not follow through on those promises (Heidelberg, 2020). While many organizations have indeed engaged in fakequity or “equity talk with no action” (Okuno Consulting, 2017), this may not explain every instance of stalled or incomplete equity action within the arts sector. In the case of fakequity, the remedy is to actually do the work of creating a more inclusive and equitable organization, rather than simply talk about it. However, if there are root causes for stalled equity action aside from fakequity, then organizations are left without guidance on how to identify and address that cause/those causes and move forward. This case examines the primary research question: what organizational practices contribute to stalled equity efforts other than fakequity? Investigating this question led to a secondary research question: what conditions help organizations move beyond stalled equity efforts? In order to address this question, I conducted a single-case study (Yin, 2014) of a midwestern museum to offer a contextualized understanding of identifying and addressing organizational elements that contribute to false starts in equity work within predominantly white arts institutions.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the attendance at museums of disabled people in Chile. To address this issue, we propose a logistic regression analysis by type of disability (i.e., physical or mobility difficulty, muteness or difficulty in speech, mental or intellectual difficulty, deafness or difficulty hearing, blindness or difficulty seeing) and severity of disability (i.e., two or more conditions in one individual). We use the National Survey of Cultural Participation in Chile 2017 (N = 12,151), a study whose main aim is to explore cultural participation and the factors that influence disabled people. Preliminary results indicate that only some disabilities negatively influence attendance at museums (e.g., physical disabilities); furthermore, the severity of the disability is also a relevant factor, considering it shows a negative influence on attendance at museums. These results suggest several implications for the infrastructure in museums, as well as repercussions in policies, procedures, funding, and financial management in museums that, if addressed, would foster inclusive environments for all individuals in Chile.

This chapter offers a case study (Yin, 2018) of Super Bowl LIII as a special opportunity for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives for arts organizations. It uses mega-event legacy theory (Preuss, 2015) to frame the outcomes as legacies. The Atlanta Super Bowl Host Committee created a specific initiative entitled Legacy 53. The Legacy 53 initiative consists of five pillars: Business Connection, Capital Improvement Project, Civil Rights and Social Justice, Sustainability, and Youth Engagement (Reed, 2018). This study offers a particular perspective on DEI structures because it examines the Civil Rights and Social Justice pillar's public art project that involved community-driven installations across Atlanta with partners including WonderRoot, an arts organization. The project highlights how administrators can prepare for and take advantage of this unique funding opportunity during future Super Bowls. By reviewing literature on mega-events, urban development, the Olympics, and Super Bowls, I examine the funding structure of the Atlanta Super Bowl Host Committee and investigate how arts organizations relate to DEI initiatives. This work addresses a gap in the literature by highlighting funding with a focus related to systemic justice because it is a unique approach that does not reflect historical Super Bowl funding trends.

This chapter offers empirical evidence of the contribution of a local and popular festival to diversity and inclusion in the hosting territory. With this in mind, three impacts (economic, social, and cultural) are determined and measured from the triple perspective of the creation of value of cultural assets. We show the case of the XXII edition of the Petronio Álvarez Pacific Music Festival held in the city of Cali (Colombia) from August 15th to 20th, 2018. The estimates were taken from three sources: (i) an input–output model adapted for the economy of the city of Cali, (ii) A face-to-face survey of 1,030 festival attendees over 18 years old, and (iii) A face-to-face survey of a representatives of each of the 173 business positions that took part in the Festival (e.g., handicrafts, musical instruments, traditional beverages, cuisine, hairstyles, and cosmetics). The results show that the festival: (i) generates inclusive material wealth, which is measured through income and employment for Afro-colombian communities, traditionally marginalized and economically disadvantaged; (ii) is shown as an opportunity to promote intercultural dialogue and diversity for the local community and tourists; and (iii) the community attending the festival (both locals and tourists) contribute to the cultural enrichment of the territory. The applied method might be replicated for other festivals case of studies in other countries in order to generate evidence that can be used for designing cultural policies which encourage diversity and equity in a specific territory.

In our current context, constant adaptation to emerging trends is crucial. There has been much discussion about digital transformation affecting all sectors. The art and event sector is no different and has been directly affected by digitalization, but what influence does this movement have on the management of these events? At the event management level, digital transformation entails organizational adjustments to roles, personal competencies, management techniques and technologies, and, more importantly, leadership philosophies to develop digital inclusion initiatives to attain broader participation in the arts.

Digital transformation's integration into events takes various forms, especially in response to challenges like the pandemic. While it creates opportunities for engagement, it also poses challenges, potentially isolating community members without digital access. The digitalization of an event must be considered at all levels to connect to the participants. Evidence in this chapter is displayed through a hybrid curated and Fringe arts festival: North Australian Festival of Arts, a leading industry example exhibiting new digital transformation models in the Australian arts. We will explore key factors underlying how digital transformation must enhance the experience and access by creating an environment that is familiar to attendees but has enough originality to make the event special and digitally inclusive. This chapter concludes by suggesting key constructs of digital transformation models for event and live performances to embrace digital inclusiveness in the arts.

In 2021, Dr Shang-Ying Chen, chair of the Department of Theatre Arts at National Sun Yat-sen University, invited me to teach in Taiwan for the 2022 academic year. I taught six 16- to 18-week courses, including creativity, marketing, theater management, and research methods, to 100 undergraduate and graduate college students in English.

As a published sociologist and practitioner of accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI), I seek to center ADEI in every aspect of my own life, which includes my teaching. My chapter “Teaching ADEI in Taiwan” is an autoethnographic study, utilizing participant observation in documenting the ways in which inclusive pedagogies of ADEI impact teaching and learning in Taiwan. As a Jewish white English-speaking researcher-teacher, I also interrogate my own racial awareness and the impact it has on my efforts to provide my Taiwanese students with an education that is culturally responsive. ¹

Since the 1980s, the Canadian federal public service has implemented employment equity legislation. ¹ However, the management of diversity in the workplace and its issues have undergone significant changes over the past 30 years. ² A recent 2021 directive from the Clerk of the Privy Council Office ordered that each department and agency have an accessibility, diversity, equity, and inclusion (ADEI) management strategy. ³ What about the measures and strategies implemented by the federal administrations in relation to culture? Based on a field survey and institutional documentary sources, the article will deal with ADEI management at Heritage Canada and Library and Archives Canada. It will present some innovations in diversity management and put them in perspective with some recent developments in the mandate entrusted to these two institutions. It will thus highlight that the evolution of the mandate of a public cultural administration in favor of the audiences it serves can impact choices and strategies for both the employees and the organizational environment.