Katherine Jones

 
EU Cultural Policy, Place-Making and Contested Identities
 
Cultural policy-making has become an increasingly significant activity of the European Union as a means to promote awareness of, and celebrate, an imagined European community. Such policies have seen the development of EU-led urban cultural events and arts festivals that seek to promote a shared cultural heritage. These initiatives, eagerly sought after by entrepreneurial city-authorities, have raised a series of questions surrounding the politics of constructing particular cultural narratives; the governance processes in, and through which, such narratives are articulated; and the extent to which contested discourses of culture represent and shape social identities. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, my PhD seeks to critically interrogate this relationship between policy, place and identity.
 
The focus of my research is the European Capital of Culture strategy and the designation of the title to both Liverpool (UK) and Stavanger (Norway) in 2008. In particular my research aims to: (I) examine the motivations and imaginations underpinning the development and deployment of the European Capital of Culture programme by the EU; (II) compare and contrast the decision-making processes in, and through which, the strategy was governed in both Liverpool and Stavanger, and the cultural narratives that consequently emerged in each city; (III) explore how ethnic minority groups in both Liverpool and Stavanger were represented in the European Capital of Culture programme, their response to such discourses, and the subsequent outcomes of the event on their identity and their everyday life in the city.
 

Dr Mike Raco and Dr Clare Herrick

KCL Graduate School Studentship

 
I graduated in Sociology from the University of Liverpool in 2008 and went on to gain an MSc in Cities, Culture and Social Change from the Department of Geography at King’s College London in 2009. My Masters dissertation analysed the economic development strategies of the London Borough of Southwark and explored how Southwark’s governance arrangements operated in, and responded to, the global financial downturn. I commenced my doctoral studies at King’s in September 2009. In the first year of my PhD I was awarded a KCL Partnership Visit Grant to conduct research at the University of Hong Kong during the summer of 2010.
 
Alongside my studies, I am a postgraduate representative on the RGS/IBG Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG) and also coordinate the Cities Group seminar programme within the department.