ekip´s profile of the month: Marcin Poprawski

Dr Marcin Poprawski is a researcher & senior lecturer at Humak University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki (Finland). The territory of his research, publishing and teaching activities belong to the shared land of cultural management, cultural policies, sustainability values, festivals, local cultural ecosystems, organisational cultures of arts, heritage and creative organisations, audience engagement, aesthetics, creative processes, and organization.  He is a leader of the Finnish team in Horizon Europe Project ‘EKIP European Cultural and Creative Industries Policy Platform’, led by Lund University.

Festivals and values. The concept and role of values in music festivals as organisations was the subject of research conducted by Humak University team member and ekip colleague – Marcin Poprawski. This work culminated in a book co-authored with Polish cultural anthropologist Waldemar Kuligowski, published by Springer Nature at the end of 2023. The book demonstrates the use of empirical research in complex cultural situations and shows how the values of festivals can be studied. It explains multiple components of a festival and explores the issue of music festivals as organisations, with insights from the perspective of organisational symbolism. The authors show that the value orientation of music festivals is evident in their non-accidental locations, the design of festival spaces and planning. Many other artefacts are shaped on the basis of values, and cooperation between the festival and the local community is built.

Waldemar Kuligowski, Marcin Poprawski, Festivals and Values. Music, Community Engagement and Organisational Symbolism, Springer Nature, Cham 2023. Book Series: Culture in Policy Making: The Symbolic Universes of Social Action: https://link.springer.com/book/9783031397516