Working With and Against: Interdisciplinary Cultural Production in Practice
Event details
While interdisciplinarity is prevalent and championed in academic research, it is also deployed as a strategic and curatorial method within contemporary arts commissioning and cultural management. However, in this context its practical application within cultural organisations is rarely interrogated with rigor. This talk introduces Interdisciplinary Cultural Production in Practice (Routledge, 2026), a book that addresses this gap by examining how non-profit arts organisations commission and produce new work that seeks to integrate divergent disciplines, art forms, and working methods into new configurations. By combining history, theory, case studies and practical guidance the book offers a critical introduction to interdisciplinary production in arts and cultural management. Adopting a production studies methodology, the research for the book draws on interviews with artistic directors, curators, and producers to investigate the practical, institutional, and audience contexts shaping this work. Rather than using a single art form as a starting point, the book focuses on the strategic act of bringing fields together. To illustrate this, the talk presents two contrasting international case studies - the collaborative curatorial approach of The Centre for the Less Good Idea (Johannesburg) and the art/tech challenge, Seven on Seven, run annually by Rhizome (New York) - to examine how knowledge and authority are negotiated, shared, and sometimes contested between artists, institutional partners and audiences.
About the speaker
Peter Merrington is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies at the University of York. His cultural management research has explored questions related to interdisciplinary cultural production, audiences, regionalism, cultural policy, and festivals. His work has been published in the books Interdisciplinary Cultural Production in Practice (Routledge, 2026) and Film Audiences: Personal Journeys with Film (MUP, 2022), as well as in journals including Studies in European Cinema, Engage, Cultural Trends, The Journal of British Cinema and Television, and Participations. Former Assistant Director of AV Festival in Newcastle, he has a background in contemporary arts management across international festivals and biennials. He holds a PhD from Newcastle University (2016) examining contemporary arts festival curating and place.