Christiaan De Beukelaer

Lecturer in Cultural Policy, University of Melbourne
Christiaan De Beukelaer is a Lecturer in Cultural Policy in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He teaches into the MA in Arts and Cultural Management and is a Research Associate of the Research Unit in Public Cultures.

He obtained his PhD ("From Cultural Development to Culture for Development: The Music Industries in Burkina Faso and Ghana") at the University of Leeds (with David Hesmondhalgh & David Lee). And holds a first degree in Musicology (BA, University of Amsterdam) and postgraduate degrees in Cultural Studies (MA, University of Leuven) and Development Studies (MSc, University of Leuven).

In 2012, he won the Cultural Policy Research Award for his doctoral research. The award from the European Cultural Foundation (which existed between 2004 and 2013), served to support researchers (up to 35 years old) who explore topics in the field of comparative cultural policy research.

His research focuses in particular on two areas:

First, he works on the cultural economy, or the interplay between cultural industries, cultural contexts, and social justice. Christiaan holds two major grants in this area: the Australia Research Council funded Discovery Project (DP180102074) "UNESCO and the Making of Global Cultural Policy" with lead CI Deborah Stevenson (Western Sydney University) and fellow CI Justin O'Connor (Monash University) and Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund project "Stretching the Celluloid Ceiling: Women’s Creative Agency in the Emergent Pacific Film Industry" with Chief Investigator Polly Stupples (Victoria University, Wellington) and fellow Partner Investigator Katerina Teaiwa (Australian National University, Canberra).

Major publications on this research include the forthcoming co-authored book Global Cultural Economy (Routledge, 2019, with Kim-Marie Spence), the authored book Developing Cultural Industries: Learning from the Palimpsest of Practice (European Cultural Foundation, 2015), and the co-authored book Globalization, Culture, and Development: The UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, with Miikka Pyykkönen and JP Singh).

Second, he works on cosmopolitan environmental citizenship. Theoretically, this work challenges the methodological nationalism that underpins cultural policy (in theory and practice), for example through the article Ordinary Culture in a World of Strangers (in the International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2017). Empirically, this line of research explores the revival of traditional sailing vessels for cargo transport, both as cultural practice and as prefigurative politics in the face of climate change.

This line of research builds on his previous involvement in the European Science Foundation COST Action "Investigating Cultural Sustainability" (2012-2015). A key publication on this is a co-edited a special issue on Cultural Policies for Sustainable Development (in the International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2017, with Anita Kangas and Nancy Duxbury; now also available as an edited book with Routledge, 2018).