The Journal of Cultural Management and Cultural Policy offers international perspectives on a wide range of issues in cultural management and cultural policy research and practice. The social situatedness of art and the interplay between artists, non-artists, institutions, and policy makers have changed in the past decades. Democracies are at risk and the geopolitical world order has changed. The global climate emergency and the rise of autocratic governments are just two forces posing new contexts and threatening possibilities for socially engaged art. At the same time, artists and curators are suspected of belonging to a new professional managerial class that entangles them in a neoliberal economic system. Can socially engaged art catalyze progressive civic consciousness? Can art address big questions of social justice? This issue provides some answers to these questions.

Constance DeVereaux (PhD) is associate professor in residence and director, MFA Arts Administration at the University of Connecticut.