“Failure seems to be the hardest word to say”

Introducing tools to help you have more honest conversations about failure.

An online workshop with Prof. David Stevenson co-hosted by University of Southampton's SIAH and SMMI.

FailSpace – also known as Cultural Participation: Stories of Success, Histories of Failure, was an AHRC funded project led by Dr Leila Jancovich (University of Leeds) and Professor David Stevenson (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh).

Over the last 3 years the FailSpace team have been examining how the cultural sector can better identify, acknowledge, and learn from failure. What we found was a cultural landscape that is not conducive to honesty or critical reflection about failures; a problem that exists not only in the cultural sector but across much of public policy. A lack of trust and open dialogue between participants, artists, organisations, and funders, fueled by a fear of losing funding, future work, or professional reputation encourages narratives of success as a self-defensive act of blame avoidance. But this discourages risk taking, encourages repetition of past mistakes and results in a failure to learn that limits significant change. We argue that the prevalence of these ‘feel-good’ narratives and the tendency to overstate impacts through uncritical stories of success risks undermining the credibility of arguments about why state subsidies for public services, including arts and culture, are necessary. In response, we developed a framework for talking about failure https://failspaceproject.co.uk/ which we hope will help to normalise conversations about the failures that inevitably occur in cultural projects and policies, where outright success or failure is rare.

In this seminar, Professor Stevenson will provide an overview of the project, their findings and provide a brief introduction to the tools that were developed. David Stevenson is Dean of Arts, Social Sciences and Management and Professor of Cultural Policy and Arts Management at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. His research concentrates on questions of cultural participation, specifically focusing on relations of power and the production of value within the UK cultural sector. His current research project is exploring the absence of failure within the dominant narratives of publicly funded cultural participation projects and policies. David is an Associate Director of the Centre for Cultural Value and a member of the National Partnership for Culture, which helps to inform and influence cultural policy decisions in Scotland.

Questions? Please reach out to Makanani Bell at makanani.bell@soton.ac.uk . Look forward to seeing you (virtually) there.

FailSpace: Tools for having Honest Conversations about Failure