Everyday participation and cultural value

[First paragraph] The articles in this special issue present some of the early findings of Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values (UEP), a 5-year large grant project, which began in 2012 and is part of the AHRC’s Connected Communities programme, receiving supplmentary funding from Creative Scotland. The project starts from the proposition that the orientation of cultural policy and state-funded cultural programming towards cultural participation and value is in need of a radical overhaul. We argue that there is an orthodoxy of approach to cultural engagement which is based on a narrow definition (and understanding) of participation, one that focuses on a narrow set of cultural forms and activities and associated cultural institutions but which, in the process, obscures the significance of other forms of cultural participation which are situated locally in the everyday realm.