Cultural Policy and Research 2005-2010

The main purpose of this programme is to influence in a wider social and cultural context, reflecting directly on Cultural policy issue in Macedonia.
It should be said straight away that the way on which we are dealing with one important theme of our society development might influence on the relations on many levels that exist in our society in direction of offering broader cultural or intellectual perspectives for some other essential strategic issues which our country is facing.
The necessary changes that should have happened in the past years in Macedonia mainly passed us by, and especially in the sphere of Culture, that in many ways should be the precursor, the avant-garde, (“reconnoitring party”) for the more radical opening of the society, outside and inside, serving as an important integrative and cohesive factor in the broadest sense.
In the contemporary understanding of culture, it has more and more relations with the community, with the most immediate social surrounding, it is connected to the municipalities, schools, minorities of all kinds – handicapped, poor; on the other side there is a strong trend of turning the culture into industry, that for example makes EU to pay more attention and trying to be compatible to the powerful American cultural industry (movies, music, etc.). Macedonia is mainly outside of those trends, persistently holding itself to an old and outdated cultural model that has been facing many problems in the past few years and in the present. It is a reason more for the urgent need to act in this important field in our society.
With this programme we would like to make a connection with one of our crucial themes: Citizenship.
Cultural policy is one of the least studied but most important domains for understanding what citizenship actually means and how it works.
We are increasingly recognizing a central argument, as Colin Mercer put once, that Cultural Policy is about citizenship because it is about the resources which define, enable, constrain and shape (both positively and negatively) that most fundamental of human capacities: identities.
Making the connection between citizenship, identity, social and cultural capital and democracy are really what this programme is about.
Cultural Policy programme is a matter of conceptually and strategically recognizing and integrating the constitutive role of culture in the development process of our society, simultaneously on both levels: national and local.