Home page JSS
(2026)
author(s): Journal of Sonic Studies
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Home page of the Journal of Sonic Studies
Left to My Own Devices Autopoiesis of Relation in Non-Spaces: Speculative-Apparatus Making
(2026)
author(s): Cemre Eraslan
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis / Research Document of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2026.
MA Artistic Research
The Art of Entrepreneurship – Entrepreneurship as Artistic Practice Entrepreneurship in the Artistic and Cultural Sector
(2026)
author(s): Christer Windeløv-Lidzelius, Tinna Joné
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This article examines entrepreneurship as a form of practice-based knowledge within the artistic and cultural sector, arguing that the dominant frameworks in arts entrepreneurship research — developed largely from outside artistic practice — have systematically underemphasised dimensions that become visible only from within. Drawing on the author's experience as a practitioner, educator, and researcher across more than two decades, the article advances a practice-based theoretical contribution organised around five claims: that arts entrepreneurship is fundamentally a discipline of endurance rather than opportunity; that the individual "artist-entrepreneur" is a convenient fiction that obscures the relational labour underlying creative work; that the field privileges outcomes where it should attend to trajectories; that failure functions not as deviation but as constitutive material; and that legitimacy, rather than market access, governs the terrain where most consequential decisions are made. The article draws on Sarasvathy's (2001) effectuation logic, DiMaggio's (1982) foundational work on cultural entrepreneurship, and Menger's (1999) analysis of artistic labour markets, among others, to situate these claims theoretically. The gardening metaphor — tending conditions rather than engineering outcomes — is proposed as a more adequate image of the entrepreneurial work artists actually perform. The article concludes with implications for artistic research, arts education, and the conceptual development of the field.
Keeping the Ground Alive: Cultural Entrepreneurship as Public Infrastructure
(2026)
author(s): Christer Windeløv-Lidzelius
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
Cultural entrepreneurship is most commonly theorised through the lens of individual agency — as a set of personal capacities oriented toward market participation, career sustainability, and creative enterprise. While this framing has generated important insights, it systematically underarticulates a dimension of entrepreneurial practice that is collective, relational, and infrastructural in character. This article proposes a reframing: cultural entrepreneurship understood not primarily as individual performance but as a form of public infrastructure — a set of organisational, relational, and temporal practices that enable cultural and artistic life to exist, persist, and circulate over time.
The argument draws on infrastructure theory (Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Bowker & Star, 1999; Larkin, 2013; Graham & Thrift, 2007) and cultural economics (Throsby, 2001; Menger, 2014; Klamer, 2017) to propose that entrepreneurial practices in cultural contexts perform three interrelated infrastructural functions: organisational scaffolding, relational maintenance, and value circulation. Crucially, this infrastructure is not continuous or static. It is pulsed — intensifying around moments of cultural activity and receding between them, occupying spaces temporarily and reconvening across time — and it is maintained primarily through care rather than governance, making it generative in practice and systematically unrecognised in policy.
The article advances a conceptual argument grounded in long-term engagement with artistic education and cultural practice, and situates its claims within broader discussions of cultural rights (UNESCO, 2005; Donders, 2010), public value (Moore, 1995; Belfiore & Bennett, 2008), and creative labour precarity (Menger, 2014; Alacovska, 2018; McRobbie, 2016). It argues that recognising the infrastructural function of cultural entrepreneurship shifts analytical and policy attention from individual achievement toward collective capacity — from the venture to the conditions that make ventures possible. The article concludes with implications for arts education, institutional practice, and cultural policy, and positions the infrastructural reframing as a foundation for a broader research programme concerned with the sustainability, equity, and political economy of cultural and artistic life.
Emergent Patterns in Cultural Entrepreneurship: Navigating Tensions, Building Networks, and Cultivating Care
(2026)
author(s): Christer Windeløv-Lidzelius, Tinna Joné
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This article examines how early-career cultural entrepreneurs navigate the conditions of artistic and entrepreneurial practice — not primarily through strategic planning or market logic, but through three interrelated modes of situated intelligence. Drawing on twenty anonymised thesis projects produced within the 30 ECTS full-time course in Artistic and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Stockholm University of the Arts, and analysed through iterative thematic coding, the study identifies three emergent patterns: the productive inhabiting of tensions between artistic intention and entrepreneurial demand; the construction of networks as relational ecologies rather than instrumental infrastructure; and the practice of care as a generative method, an epistemological stance, and at times a counter-ethic to dominant models of creative labour. Together, these patterns constitute what the article proposes as a form of situated entrepreneurial intelligence — one that is ethical before it is strategic, relational before it is individual, and oriented toward sustaining conditions for creative work rather than optimising outcomes.
The article further argues that dominant frameworks in cultural entrepreneurship, developed largely within business school traditions, achieve only partial fit when applied to artistic and cultural contexts. This partial fit is not merely conceptual but linguistic: the vocabulary of entrepreneurship — competition, market, scalability — can land as alienating or reductive in contexts where practitioners are oriented toward mutual recognition, contribution, and relational depth. The study contributes to an emerging body of scholarship that takes seriously the epistemological authority of practice-based knowledge in cultural entrepreneurship research, and draws on effectuation theory (Sarasvathy, 2001), ethics of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Alacovska & Bissonnette, 2021), and recent empirical work on cultural entrepreneurship challenges (Näsholm & Eriksson, 2024) to situate its findings theoretically. Methodological attention is given to the dual position of the authors as both educators and researchers, to the ethical boundaries of single-cohort analysis, and to the conditions under which AI-assisted writing may inflect student self-expression — a methodological challenge the study addresses directly rather than avoids.
FutureBrownSpace
(2026)
author(s): John-Paul Zaccarini
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
FutureBrownSpace: Black Study, Institutional Whiteness and Speculative Pedagogies.
A Vetenskaprådet Artistic Research Project at Stockholm University of the Arts.
FutureBrownSpace investigates how Black Study and experimental pedagogies can mitigate the psychic, affective and material effects of institutional whiteness within Scandinavian arts education and cultural life. Centring Black, Brown and other racialised practitioners, the project explores how expert yet relational “future brown spaces” which are inclusive yet undiluted might function as sites of nourishment, study and world-building within and alongside majority-white institutions. Grounded in performance, speculative fiction, and therapeutic and decolonial methodologies, FutureBrownSpace asks how the auto-ethnographic expertise that non white communities hold on unconscious racism can be translated into transformative pedagogical and artistic tools.
Methodologically, the project combines long-term collective workshops, performance lectures, writing laboratories, reading groups and public events with qualitative documentation (autoethnographic and speculative writing with audio-visual recording). These activities are iteratively designed and facilitated in collaboration with Black and Brown artists, students, activists, healers and scholars, generating a transdisciplinary research environment rather than a fixed curriculum., situating lived experiences of racialisation in relation to contemporary Black studies, queer of colour critique and critical pedagogy.
The project’s main results include: 1) the development of a toolbox of artistic-pedagogical formats (workshops, speculative writing protocols, performance lectures, group processes) that support non white participants in processing minority stress and experiencing increased safety, play and risk taking in their creative work, while simultaneously providing calm spaces for "white anxiety" to be allayed; 2) the establishment of recurring Black Study platforms inside a Nordic arts university, where Black Study is recognised as a creative process rather than only a content area; and 3) a body of research based artworks, texts and public interventions that render the dynamics of institutional whiteness affectively and intelligibly available to wider audiences. These results demonstrate that relatively small, structurally protected study spaces can significantly shift how racialised subjects inhabit educational and artistic institutions, and how those institutions come to understand their own racial politics.
The project contributes to debates in performance studies, artistic research, Black studies and pedagogy by articulating a model of Black Study as a collective, therapeutic and speculative practice that is inseparable from questions of care and institutional design. Socially, the work offers transferrable methods for schools, arts organisations and community groups seeking to move beyond representational inclusion towards conditions in which Black and Brown life, thought and feeling can flourish.
