February 23-25 2020
RUPRI and the RUPRI Rural Cultural Wealth-Lab will be hosting a virtual research conference, Role of the Arts and Cultural Capital in Rural Innovation & Entrepreneurship
Conference Themes are:
- The proclivity of the arts and cultural capital to generate nonobvious solutions to complex problems will be a focus of this conference and will draw on historical and contemporary examples to demonstrate the utility of this asset in addressing a broad range of rural development challenges.
- The interaction of the arts and cultural capital with other community capitals and the importance of these interactions for developing rural community stability and resiliency, including in response to trauma, change, and uncertainty, and in communities experiencing systemic injustice.
- Developing and sustaining cultural capital as a community capital through promoting arts and culture as a means of unleashing creative capital and innovation.
The Conference has the following goals:
- Establish an approach that examines and builds support for research that centers on the role played in rural innovation by cultural capital and the arts.
- Provide a comprehensive approach for studying and supporting rural innovation, with a focus on the early stage of innovation, through the generation of new ideas through imagination, the creative spark, and the harnessing of community relationships to support this innovative process.
- Build a deeper research community that is called upon to address research gaps and supports the research foci of emerging scholars. Inclusion of researchers and community partners studying and representing communities who have experienced cultural misappropriation and cultural dismissal, including Indigenous, Black Belt, and Bordercommunities, will be of particular focus.
