2022 was an eventful year for the project Rapids and backwaters. This was the first year almost entirely free from the covid-19 restrictions.

We started the year with some of us lecturing at the PhD-course «Current Trends and Developments in Cultural Policy Studies» at the University of South-Eastern Norway, with special topic «Cultural policy and creative labour in the age of digitzation». In the lectures we showed examples from the project within the theme: How does digitization change the value chains and affect
the work situation of different groups of creative workers?

Later in the spring we had two publications from our project partners. First Mira Burri with the chapter Copyright as an Engine for Creativity: A Critical Appraisal of Contemporary Developments in Intermediaries’ Liability Regulation, which was published in The Oxford Handbook of Arts and Cultural Management. Christian Handke, together with Carolina Dalla Chiesa published the article «The art of crowdfunding arts and innovation: the cultural economic perspective» in the Journal of Cultural Economics.

In June, most of the project group met in Bø, Norway, where Telemark Research Institute is located. Over two days, we discussed the planned anthology, and planned for the panel at ICCPR in Antwerp.

ICCPR in Antwerp took place in September, where the project was represented in a panel, and with three papers. You can read more about those at the «Publications and presentations»-site.

In November, we had a digital meeting to discuss the progress of the forthcoming anthology.

There were also two publications at the end of the year. The first article, «Digital cultural policy. The story of a slow and reluctant revolution«, describes digital cultural policy as a slow and ambivalent or reluctant revolution in a policy field. In investigates how cultural policy has gradually been affected by digitalization in the field of cultural production. The second article, «Pandemic cultural policy. A comparative perspective on Covid-19 measures and their effect on cultural policies in Europe«, showed, among other things, that cultural policies have not been fundamentally challenged by the pandemic, in the sense that it has affected the essential political tools, divisions of labour, or core goals. Both articles were published in International Journal of Cultural Policy.

We are very exited for 2023. We hope it will be filled with constructive discussions, and the presentation of more publications and results from the project.