About the Journal

Aims

Culture Caleidoscoop is an online, peer-reviewed publication for research, critical reflection, and knowledge exchange on socially engaged practices across the cultural and heritage sectors. It is international and interdisciplinary in scope and aims to bridge theory and practice.

Culture Caleidoscoop is open-access: it is free for all to read and to contribute to. We invite reflective practitioners, academic researchers, volunteers, and anyone else involved in this work to read and contribute. Contributions are published on a rolling basis.

We aim to move towards a more open, equitable, inclusive, and representative landscape of producing, sharing, and valuing knowledge. Learning from and with each other, contributors and readers will reflect on ways of working and the impact of this work across disciplines, borders, and professions or practices.

Scope

Culture Caleidoscoop publishes contributions covering a wide range of research and reflections relating to socially engaged practices in the arts, cultural, and heritage sectors. Socially engaged practices encompass the activities, actions, methods, skills, and strategies that relate to, involve, and affect individuals, communities, and society. Topics include participation, community engagement, inclusion and equity, (creative) interpretation, decolonization, democratization, the social value of heritage, museum education, social justice, audience research, community archaeology, and community or participatory arts.

We encourage contributions that focus on the complexity and unfinished-ness of this work. We believe that there is much to be learned from acknowledging, accepting, and celebrating the messiness of practice and process.

Contributors are invited to share their research and reflections through a range of media most suited to their discipline and experience, such as research papers, interviews, reflective pieces, photo essays, video essays and other visual contributions. Culture Caleidoscoop promotes a range of research methods and approaches, such as artistic research or ethnographic research as well as interdisciplinary research—by researchers connected to academia as well as professionals working in arts, cultural, and heritage organisations.

We encourage collaborative contributions and we support contributions from those with less experience writing in academic journals.

The primary language of the publication is English, but we will consider contributions including or submitted in other languages if agreed in advance with the editorial team. We promote international research and seek to address an imbalance between the voices that are currently emphasized in the (English-language) publications in these sectors. We also hope this will broaden the conversation by assimilating a wide variety of contributions from across the globe.

Culture Shift Foundation

Culture Caleidoscoop is an activity of the foundation Culture Shift (registered in the Netherlands). The current board members are Merel van der Vaart and Lorna Cruickshanks.