Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

A growing body of research evidence points to the positive impact of the arts on health and well-being of people. The cumulative results have emerged alongside cultural policy-making and as professionals in the arts have justified their work in hybrid contexts in the boundary zone between the arts, health care and social services. In Finland, where a regional government, health and social services reform is currently taking place, the value of the arts for health and well-being has been highlighted in various governmental documents and policy processes in recent years. Participation in the arts is viewed as a potential means to cut social and health costs in a country where the growing proportion of old people in the population contributes towards a sustainability gap, which has been said to challenge public finances. Located in such social and political context, ArtsEqual Research Initiative investigates the arts as public service, with equality as the starting point. Funded by the Academy of Finland’s Strategic Research Council, ArtsEqual generates not only new research on the arts and arts education but also research-based arts policy briefs to outline the policies and actions needed for the arts to meet the social challenges of the 2020s in Finland. This paper will draw from two processes of policy brief writing in ArtsEqual during 2016 and 2017 to address the following questions: What is the nature and defining features of the ArtsEqual policy briefs? Why did these policy briefs come about? How have they been prepared and disseminated? In addition, this paper will use a descriptive-interpretative qualitative approach to scrutinise two policy brief documents to answer two questions: How the Constitution of Finland and international human rights instruments are used in the policy briefs to argue for equity and access in the arts and culture in the context of social and health services? How is the human development and capability approach used in the policy briefs together with research on the arts, health and wellbeing to argue for cultural well-being in the context of social and health services?