Re-ordering and re-performing: Re-placing cultural participation and re-viewing well-being measures

This chapter reflects on empirical findings to present methodological developments that emerged from investigating the well-being agenda and cultural policy. Research evaluating the impact of cultural participation tends to approach participants and ask how a given dose of culture (such as a community arts programme or a particular performance, for example) may have improved their well-being, and has been criticised for lacking robustness. This chapter attempts to reveal what happens when you test this relationship by re-ordering the research site and variable: instead, using a secondary, large-scale qualitative data set collected about well-being to ask it questions of culture.

I ‘re-performed’ the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS)’ Measuring National Well-being (MNW) Debate, which enabled me to listen to people describe what matters to them and compare these to headline reports. Drawing from Butler’s recent developments of performativity as ‘re-performance’, a mode in which dysfunction can be exposed, the chapter applies this to a methodology of revealing, re-telling, re-ordering and re-placing. The chapter summarises findings from secondary analysis of ONS qualitative survey data, together with group discussions, re-producing methodologies of the ONS. It reveals aspects of the values that well-being, cultural and policy research obscure and reflects on how cultural participation might be re-placed in conceptions of well-being for policy. Knowledge of participation and well-being is not a neutral representation of either. Disrupting and re-ordering knowledge practices enables an understanding of the relationship between cultural participation and well-being in a way that better encompasses how the good life is lived.