Bio

Alice Borchi is a Lecturer in Creative Industries at the School of Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds, where she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate modules across different programmes. Her research interests include the study of the cultural commons and cultural value, with a particular focus on participatory practices and shared governance in cultural policy and management. This has led her to look at grassroots practices outside of traditional cultural policy-making. She is also interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the safeguard of the commons that bring together environmental and cultural perspectives. She is a member of the Centre for Cultural Policy at the University of Leeds.

Project

During my stay I will work on a monograph on the cultural commons, provisionally titled Commoning cultural value: Building hope and resistance in neoliberal times. The aim of this book is to formalize a commons-oriented framework for the formation of cultural value as a way to oppose current neoliberal understandings of the value of culture. In order to do so, on the one hand, the book will assess how neoliberalism has changed our understanding of culture; on the other, it will explain how the concept of the commons provides a way to resist to this narrative.