01-07-2019 Plenary meeting in Warsaw: setting the scene for the case study selection

On June 27th and 28th, 2019, the CICERONE team met in Warsaw at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (SWPS) for its first plenary meeting. The main focus of the meeting was the kick-starting of the cultural and creative sector studies and, as part of these, the identification of potential case studies: which networks, places, products and actors/firms should each of these cases investigate? And what should be the dimensions of comparison between them?

CICERONE is now running for almost half a year. So far, the team has produced 11 reports on substantive, but also on data management, communication and ethical issues. Great progress was made in preparing for the empirical part of the project: the cross-border comparative case studies (click here to read the corresponding reports that sets out how to embark on this empirical research). The plenary meeting in Warsaw was to take these preparations another step further and find common ground for a shared framework for the case study selection.

On the first day of the meeting, Dorota Ilczuk, Roman Cieslak (Rector of SWPS) and Miroslav Filiciak (Dean of SWPS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences) welcomed the CICERONE consortium at the Warsaw University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

After the introduction and presentation of the manifold outputs, progresses and findings, the meeting focused on the empirical part of the project. For the empirical research, eight different sectors of the CCIs have been chosen: crafts, architecture, music, publishing, design, audio-visual and radio, festivals, performing & visual arts as well as archives, libraries and cultural heritage. For this reason, the consortium split into eight teams who, after some preliminary research on the different fields, presented their findings and described the characteristics and dimensions of variation of specific CCI sectors.

On day two, the consortium discussed the general organization of the empirical research and the questionnaire, as well as of practical issues such as data sharing and management, research ethics and collective writing and citing. Clementine Dabeuf from KEA also presented quantitative statistics of Europe’s CCIs and pointed to some challenges concerning the gaps and comparability issues of quantitative data. Having discussed on potential case studies and gathered inspiration and information on the research setting, each of the eight groups will select two or three case studies and do some further research on their sector. The next meeting will take place in February 2020 in Barcelona.