Transformational vision and Residents of Coventry

This project addressed how the City of Culture’s transformational vision for Coventry and its residents was enacted, lived with, and experienced by residents in key positions within the City’s civic, cultural, and business communities. Scholars from the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick unearthed in-depth stories of three networks within the city and the effects the title has on them.

The team identified cross-sectoral partnerships generated in the lead-up to and throughout the City of Culture year, then worked with these networks to assess the value and sustainability of these partnerships. This was conceived as a collaborative, participant-led project in which qualitative research evidence was gathered at strategic points to tell an unfolding ‘insider’ story of the expectations, experiences and effects of the programme, and its role in re-imagining the future of Coventry.

About the team

The project's principal investigator was Dr Vishalakshi Roy, former Assistant Professor at the Centre for Cultural and Media Policy Studies and researcher with extensive evaluation experience within the local cultural ecology.

Vishalakshi has been part of the creative and cultural sector for the last 20 years as a consultant and an academic. Her research interests include entrepreneurship and the management of creative businesses and cultural organisations, their markets and audiences. More recently, she has contributed to research that fed into Coventry’s 10-year Cultural Strategy 2017-2027, the city’s City of Culture bid, evaluation of Coventry’s Great Place programme and a study into the identity of creative practitioners in the city. Vishalakshi is a certified member of the Market Research Society.

The team also included Dr Heidi Ashton, who drew and built on the participatory methodologies from her Urban Village project on Coventry's Roma Community, Dr Jonathan Vickery, extended and developed his work on how the discourse on Cultural Rights can inform civic development in Coventry City of Culture 2021, and Dr David Wright with his research into public art and extensive experience of mixed-method empirical investigation of cultural participation.

Image courtesy of Charlie Shelton