One Month in the Life of a Latvian Academy of Culture Researcher: November as the Peak of the Research Year
Baiba Tjarve, Deputy Head of the Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, Senior Researcher and International Research Project Developer, Latvian Academy of Culture
Research is often perceived as individual work – a scholar, his/her ideas, and publications. Every study stands on the work of a team: colleagues, partners, students, institutions and international networks. This shared effort is what makes research meaningful and capable of creating impact. For this reason, in this opinion article I intentionally avoid speaking only in the first person. In research, very little is achieved alone – and the “we” here refers both to our team and to the broader community shaping and advancing cultural research in Latvia and beyond. To show what this “we” approach looks like in practice, I invite you to look inside one very concrete month that reveals the rhythm, collaboration and outcomes of research at the Latvian Academy of Culture (LAC).
November is always a special month in research – new collaborations begin, new project proposals are submitted, results are presented, conferences take place, and it is often the moment when the culmination of collective work becomes most visible. It is frequently the most intense period of the year, when the work of many months converges into a single calendar month. This is exactly why I chose to share the story of November – to show how dynamic and diverse one month of our research life can be.
As November began, we met online with Malin Weijmer from “Kulturanalys Norden” – the Nordic Centre for Cultural Policy Research. I met Malin at the Nordic Cultural Policy Conference this summer, and she invited one of LAC’s researchers to contribute to an edited volume on the role of culture in the context of growing geopolitical tension; on how culture and the arts can help strengthen the resilience of individuals and states. Malin noted that Latvia has long-term experience living under the threat of war and that our contribution could significantly enrich this collective work, which will primarily focus on the Nordic countries.
The Nordic region is an excellent example of how to organise collaboration in cultural policy research – with a dynamic research community that meets at the regular Nordic Cultural Policy Conference, publishes a joint academic journal and actively cooperates in different research projects. For this reason, it seemed important to invite representatives of the Latvian Ministry of Culture and Malin to a shared discussion, allowing her to introduce us to Nordic cooperation in cultural policy analysis and research. We hope to strengthen cultural policy research in Latvia and initiate collaboration on a Baltic level as well.
4–7 November: LAC’s annual international conference “Culture Crossroads”
For several years now, “Culture Crossroads” has been more than a one-day event. There are so many themes – all highly relevant both for cultural professionals and students – that the conference has organically grown into an almost week-long series of events, including a strong international dimension.
For me, the most important day will be 5th November, dedicated to youth civic participation (the conference “Youth Civic Participation: Decorative or Authentic? Formal or Meaningful?”). This topic has been central in both the fundamental and applied research project “Striving Towards Participatory Engagement in Museums: Inquiry into Museum Education Practice in Latvia” (MEET), which I lead, and the national research programme project “Preconditions of authentic youth participation in formal and non-formal education” (UNFRAMED), where I am the principal researcher.
In the MEET project, we spent three years examining how museums can work more effectively with their communities and what challenges they face, particularly in engaging young people. UNFRAMED focused on what authentic and meaningful participation means – whether existing approaches truly address young people’s interests, rather than primarily reflecting the perspectives of institutions.
In both projects, we repeatedly encountered the difficult question of power relations: how to change them and how challenging it is. For participation to be genuine, young people (or any group involved) must participate in decision-making, feel heard and considered. We experience this ourselves as researchers working with participatory methods – it requires partly relinquishing the expert position and giving participants more influence over the research process. This is not easy, especially in environments where we are used to thinking that “we know better.”
At the end of the day, in cooperation with the Baltic Museology Association, we also launched the Latvian translation of Nina Simon’s book “The Participatory Museum”. In clear and accessible language, it explains how to involve communities in institutional work and how to give up part of the power to visitors, participants and community members. These insights apply not only to museums but to the cultural field more broadly.
20 November: deadline for several international research project submissions
As the Deputy Head of LAC’s Institute of Arts and Cultural Studies, this period is particularly active for me in two areas: identifying and initiating new collaborations and supporting colleagues in developing project proposals.
This summer and autumn have been especially intensive in preparing submissions for the EU research and innovation programme Horizon Europe. This time, we are participating in diverse calls and expanding our collaborations beyond the usual arts and culture fields, developing interdisciplinary projects involving environmental research, health, artistic activities, and cooperation with LAC colleagues from performing and audiovisual arts.
Given the high competition in Horizon Europe projects, we view the benefits not only in terms of the result, but also in terms of the proposal development process itself. This process provides new partnerships, experience in consortium coordination, insight into current research priorities, and helps us grow both as researchers and as an institution.
25 November: policy dialogue on the future of crafts in Europe
This day will bring a joint discussion organised by several Horizon Europe projects with representatives of the European Commission and other policymakers. We will present collaboratively developed policy recommendations for the development of the crafts sector in Europe.
LAC is a partner in the project “Tracks4Crafts” (Transforming Crafts Knowledge for a Sustainable, Inclusive and Economically Viable Cultural Heritage in Europe). As part of the project, we conducted an extensive mapping of policies and regulatory frameworks across European countries concerning the crafts sector. The study revealed how complex and ambiguous this field is. Crafts can be a significant economic sector (as in Germany, where it includes more than 130 professions – from construction to food production) or a form of traditional cultural heritage, where key issues include craftsperson status, skills preservation, transmission and intellectual property protection. In some countries, traditional crafts integrate closely with contemporary art and design; in others, they are protected as values to be passed on to the next generation.
This complexity creates a challenge: if the sector cannot be defined clearly, it becomes difficult to design appropriate policies and support instruments. Which approaches are the most suitable? When should preservation be prioritised, and when development and innovation? We are still working to answer these questions, also preparing academic publications.
A particularly valuable experience is the initiative “CRAFTOUR,” which brings together five Horizon Europe projects (Craeft, Tracks4Crafts, Colour4Crafts, Hephaestus, Culturality). It has already become a strong collaboration platform for researchers, practitioners and policymakers. The initiative produces joint policy recommendations, organises discussions and is preparing an international conference as well as a collective volume with a prestigious publisher.
This experience raises an important question – should a similar collaboration model be developed within projects funded by the Latvian Council of Science if they address related or interconnected themes?
A look into an LAC researcher’s November shows that research is not an individual or solitary activity, but a process of shared conversations and collaborations, where one must sometimes leave their comfort zone, accept new challenges and learn to see their research interests in very different contexts.