ekip´s profile of the month: Marcin Poprawski
Research at the intersection of culture, policy, and sustainability
Dr Marcin Poprawski is a researcher and senior lecturer at Humak University of Applied Sciences in Helsinki, Finland. His research, publishing, and teaching activities span the shared territory of cultural management, cultural policy, sustainability values, festivals, local cultural ecosystems, organisational cultures of arts and heritage organisations, audience engagement, aesthetics, and creative processes.
He is the leader of the Finnish team in the Horizon Europe project “EKIP – European Cultural and Creative Industries Policy Platform”, coordinated by Lund University.
Festivals as value-driven organisations
One of Marcin Poprawski’s key research areas focuses on music festivals and values, exploring festivals not only as events, but as complex organisations shaped by symbolic, cultural, and ethical orientations.
This research culminated in a book co-authored with Polish cultural anthropologist Waldemar Kuligowski, published by Springer Nature at the end of 2023. The book demonstrates how empirical research can be applied to complex cultural contexts and explains how the values of festivals can be identified, analysed, and interpreted.
Organisational symbolism and community engagement
The publication explores multiple components of festivals as organisations, examining how values are reflected in:
- the non-accidental locations of festivals
- the design and planning of festival spaces
- organisational artefacts shaped by symbolic meaning
- cooperation between festivals and local communities
Through the lens of organisational symbolism, the authors show how values influence both internal structures and external relationships, positioning festivals as active actors within local cultural ecosystems.
Recent publication
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
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