Call for Paper
Creative Infrastructures in the Spotlight: Shaping the Futures of Arts Entrepreneurship
June 2nd-3rd, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.
How can we imagine, design, and create spaces for arts-based start-ups in a turbulent world?
Entrepreneurship from within artistic communities and directed at the creative industries is a poorly understand and routinely undervalued phenomenon. Spaces like 'arts incubators' uniquely bring together business incubation services with the world of artists and creative professionals – but they walk a difficult line. Such 'creative infrastructure' can often appear too capitalistic and profit-oriented for artists and art students. Equally, creative infrastructures can appear too artistically diffuse to those crafting entrepreneurship and investment policy, for whom high-growth and scalable tech enterprises are the ideal-type of entrepreneurship. To better understand how the entrepreneurial and artistic worlds could sustain each other through shared infrastructure, we need to first shed light upon the 'ouroboros' of value between economic, social and cultural capital, embodied in the figure of the artist-entrepreneur, as discussed in Linda Essig's 2022 book, Creative Infrastructures: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action (Intellect Books).
In this two-day colloquium, we invite scholars and practitioners from entrepreneurship studies, cultural policy, social sciences, and the arts, to explore the future of creative infrastructures (including arts incubators and other spaces of hybrid value creation) and their role in the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. As nations increasingly entangle their industrial policy with cultural branding, enterprises in the creative industries hold promise for creating more sustainable and diverse futures. To learn from the Anglo-American models of arts-incubators, the workshop features a keynote speech from Linda Essig, who pioneered arts incubator research and arts entrepreneurship education in US universities and launched Artivate: Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts. We invite you all to come and discuss the challenges and opportunities for creative infrastructures against the backdrop of socio-economic pressures.
Who can apply?
We invite applications for paper presentations from academics of all levels (including PhD students and early career scholars). We also invite presentations from practitioners and administrators of university arts entrepreneurship programmes, creative incubators and other education spaces.
How to apply
Please fill out the application form (https://forms.gle/L17TnzYjV8E3Ufnh7), which includes an abstract (500 words max) delineating the topic of your presentation. The deadline for applications is Friday April 11th. Invitations will be sent out soon after that.
Practical information
The colloquium will be held at Aarhus University (Aarhus, Denmark) from Monday 2nd-Tuesday 3rd June. Attendance to the colloquium is free of charge. Some funding may be available for travel and accommodation (please send details of need and motivation to Kai Roland Green kai@cc.au.dk). Some sessions may be available to view as hybrid via Zoom and/or Teams.
Organizing Team
The colloquium is organized by Assistant Professor Shuang L. Frost (shuangfrost@cc.au.dk) and Postdoc Kai Roland Green (kai@cc.au.dk) from the Department of Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University. Funding is generously provided by the 'Cultures and Practices of Digital Technologies' (CuPra) research group at Aarhus University, and the Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond (DFF) funded project 'Communities-of-Practice Approach to Entrepreneurial Education in Danish University Incubators'.
Keynote Speaker: Linda Essig
Linda Essig, MFA, PhD, is currently Baruch College's Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs. She previously served as dean of the College of Arts & Letters at California State University, Los Angeles (Cal State LA) where she was responsible for nine academic departments, four centers, and the university's gallery. Prior to Cal State LA, Dr. Essig was director of Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Programs for the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University (ASU) and founding director of its School of Theatre and Film. She also served as chair of the Department of Theatre & Drama and director of University Theatre at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Essig has authored four books and numerous articles and book chapters on both arts entrepreneurship and theatre lighting design. Her most recent book Creative Infrastructure: Artists, Money, and Entrepreneurial Action was published with Intellect Books in 2022. She also launched Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts, a premiere research journal for the field.
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Shuang Lu Frost, PhD
Assistant Professor of Digital Innovation and Business Transformation
Department of Digital Design and Information Studies | Aarhus University
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