Toby Miller's Presentation on Cultural Policy (12/5/03)

As part of our ongoing speaker series supported by the Ford Foundation's Division of Knowledge, Creativity & Freedom, our December 5 presentation was entitled, "Cultural Citizenship." The distinguished speaker was Professor Toby Miller.

ABSTRACT: Aesthetically, culture operates globally as a signifier of differences and similarities in taste and status within groups. Anthropologically, culture refers to how we live our lives, often between social groups or populations. Bridging these aesthetic and anthropological registers is cultural policy. Institutions enable and support creativity and collective ways of life by soliciting, training, distributing, financing, and rejecting actors and activities. In this presentation, Professor Miller examines "blood and soil" questions of citizenship—political, economic, and cultural—from a variety of perspectives and summarizes what each analysis entails for cultural policy. Miller outlines the positions of five international scholars: Tony Bennett (cultural studies), Renato Rosaldo (anthropology), Will Kymlicka (political theory), Bhiku Parekh (political theory), and Amelie Rorty (philosophy). In Miller's view, citizenship should be a demographic matter based on where one lives, not on "blood or soil."

BACKGROUND READING: Miller, T. (2002). Cultural citizenship. In E. F. Isin and B. S. Turner (Eds.), Handbook of citizenship studies. London: Sage.

Toby Miller is Professor of Film & Visual Culture, Sociology, and Women's Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Before moving to Riverside, he was Professor of Cultural Studies and Cultural Policy in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Program in American Studies, and the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author and editor of twenty-one books, including: The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Contemporary Australian Television (University of New South Wales Press, 1994 with Stuart Cunningham); Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Popular Culture and Everyday Life (Sage Publications, 1998 with Alec McHoul); Film and Theory: An Anthology (Basil Blackwell, 2000 edited with Robert Stam); Global Hollywood (British Film Institute/Indiana University Press, 2001 with Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell); Cultural Policy (Sage Publications, 2002 with George Yudice); and Critical Cultural Policy Studies: A Reader (Basil Blackwell, 2003 edited with Justin Lewis).