MASS CULTURE CANADA
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Mission Statement
Mass Culture is dedicated to recognizing, undertaking and disseminating professional research that is relevant to the Canadian arts community. By convening cultural workers and academics, Mass Culture provides a platform for knowledge to be explored, widely understood, and mobilized. By circulating robust, inclusive research through a healthy network, Mass Culture will deepen the capacity of communities to develop an interconnected Canadian arts sector, empowered to reflect and make informed decisions towards a future in which the arts sector in Canada can thrive. We are committed to ensuring all communities have the ability to mobilize and benefit from arts and culture research.
About This Cause
Mass Culture is a collaborative support organization that takes a community based approach to providing diverse parties with the context and connections needed to enhance the equitable mobilization of arts and culture research. By convening cultural workers and academics, Mass Culture provides a platform for knowledge to be explored, widely understood, and mobilized. Mass Culture stemmed from an idea created by arts managers and artists in 2015. As arts advocates deeply embedded within the sector, this group recognized that greater capacity for arts research was needed. To do this well, they prioritized working in consultation with the arts sector to develop a structure that: involved the arts community; better connected the sector to academic research; and had the outreach mechanisms in place to give voice to those who aren’t normally engaged in arts research and formalized knowledge creation. In 2019, Mass Culture successfully merged with the Canadian Conference of the Arts (CCA), an organization formally constituted in 1945. This provided Mass Culture the stability needed to hire full time staff and work with its network to produce its first strategic plan, which was presented during its AGM in 2021. Led by four Working Groups, Mass Culture has taken on a network-based governance structure that aims to further distribute its decision-making power while working in relationship with the arts sector as much as possible. Since its inception, Mass Culture has convened over 1600 scholars and arts leaders across the country in community-led conversations focused on emergent ideas and issues. These conversations have aided in discovering which areas of research are relevant to the arts sector. They have guided Mass Culture to connect, amplify, and identify new collaborations to explore alternative modes of knowledge creation and distribution. OUR RESEARCH PRIORITIES: - Framing Arts Impact by conveying the value of the arts in society; - To create a Community of Practice for arts research; - To conduct Research About the Arts Sector, allowing us to get to know ourselves better. OUR RESEARCH PROJECTS: Research in Residence In collaboration with its partners, this project, provides three exciting new qualitative arts impact frameworks to the arts sector. These new arts impact measurement tools are gamechangers. The result of two years of research, the frameworks provide innovative, effective ways of measuring the impact of the arts in communities and society. They all use methods rooted in respect for a multitude of ways of researching, knowing, being, and creating lasting, meaningful impact. React, Recreate, Revision A SSHRC-funded research project employing arts-based research methodologies to surface and amplify marginalized and suppressed knowledges and resistances. It will explore cultural policymaking gaps and processes with young 2SLBGTQI+ and BIPOC artists as co-researchers, to increase their access and opportunities to make critical contributions to policies that affect them. Together, partners and researchers will mobilize diverse experiences and knowledges to co-create and impact processes of change towards community arts, and social justice informed policymaking. The project is facilitated by a team of artists and researchers from partner organizations including The Institute (a project of Sketch Working Arts), Mass Culture, and OCAD University. The project is coordinated by Dr. Alia Weston and Charlotte Lombardo. Staging Better Futures SBF/MSMA is a cross-sectoral partnership mandated to enact decolonial, anti-racist, and intersectional feminist change in post-secondary theatre education across Canada. With a Partnership SSHRC grant (budget of $5.5 million over seven years) SBF/MSMA brings together 120 official partners to address the barriers to DC/AR/EDI in the post-secondary theatre sector. Mass Culture’s involvement in this research project is to lead the project’s governance study. The Arts Impact Partnership (TAIP) TAIP at The Creative School of Toronto Metropolitan University, in collaboration with Mass Culture and other partners, aims to tackle this challenge. TAIP brings together a vast network of researchers, organizations, and partners from Canada, the US, and internationally to better measure and communicate the impact of the arts OUR INITIATIVES: D.N.A (Data Narratives for the Arts) An initiative to ignite data empowerment within the arts community! D.N.A is a program that includes the Arts Data Platform, an unparalleled national resource of financial and operational data from 4000+ charitable arts organizations and a Data-Utilization Learning Series that will enable arts professionals to utilize data in a practical way and enhance arts organizations’ ability to tell impactful stories through data. DNA will empower the arts sector with a data-driven mindset, showcasing the genuine value and immense impact this sector brings to society!