Katya Johanson
Biographic Data
| ID | 3594168 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Katya Johanson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Katya |
| FAMILY NAME | Johanson |
| SIGNATURE | JOHANSON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7332-4645 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 30 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Centring the audience
Many arts organisations seek to increase the diversity of their audiences. Recent literature suggests that this requires organisations to interrogate and change their ways of operating. This is a fundamental shift for a sector that has long considered the goal of diversifying audiences as a problem external to the organisation. Responding to this discrepancy, this article compares attitudes and behaviours among workers in arts organisations, to i…
Capital, labour and currency
This article examines the relationship between emotion, production and sales in the book publishing industry, specifically how ‘book love’ operates in the publication and promotion of Young Adult (YA) titles. Through interviews conducted in 2020–2023, the article examines how commissioning editors, booksellers and associated professionals in Australia experience and use emotion in their production and sale of YA titles. It argues that emotion pla…
Activating rural infrastructures in regional communities
This article examines the issues involved in publicly funded regional arts initiatives, through two contrasting examples of art works that creatively repurpose grain silos in rural Australia: the Silo Art Trail in north-west Victoria, and the silo art practices of the small town of Natimuk in the same region. Via desktop analysis supported by observation and interviews, we consider these initiatives in the context of a turn to arts-led regenerati…
Risky business
The field of cultural policy has seen a shift towards considerations of diversity, with government bodies increasingly leveraging funding to combat inequality within organisations. A barrier to this aim is a lack of quantitative data, which would provide a means to evaluate the impact of specific policies in practice. This article investigates the relationship between gender inequality at an organisational level and cultural policy at a sectoral …
Collecting and classifying data on audience identity
This article investigates the issues and tensions involved in collecting data from audiences to describe their diversity. It uses data collected as part of a survey of festival audiences to examine (1) how people choose to describe their identity in an open-text question and (2) how classifying complex responses to questions about ethnic or cultural background has implications for analysis. First, data provided through an open-text question in th…
Who Did You Meet at the Venice Biennale? Education-to-Work Transition Enhancers for Aspiring Arts Professionals in Australia
Precarious employment and unpaid labour are common features of the cultural and creative industries. While existing literature highlights the benefit of professional development in building careers, it focuses on self-driven rather than formalised activities. Social capital and social disadvantage are recognised as major factors limiting career success. Yet, it is unclear whether formalised professional development programs offer advantages to ov…
Ownvoices, Disruptive Platforms, and Reader Reception in Young Adult Publishing
The concept of #ownvoices writing has gained traction in contemporary publishing as both a genre of reader interest and a focus for debates about authors’ rights to write cross-culturally. This paper examines tensions the #ownvoices movement reveals between the commissioning, publishing, and critical reception of a book, using debate about Craig Silvey’s Honeybee , an Australian novel focalized through a young trans protagonist but written by a s…
Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts
Beyond the “good story” and sales history
In recent years, critics’ attention has been drawn to a persistent lack of diversity in the publishing industry. These claims are based on ethnic and cultural homogeneity amongst authors, publishing company staff and content. While scholars have pointed to the role that publishers’ decision-making processes have played in reinforcing a lack of diversity, this article focuses on how such processes position the audience, and how they contribute to …
Is there a 'Venice Effect'? Participation in the Venice Biennale and the implications for artists' careers
Prestige is widely considered to positively influence the careers of artists, and the Venice Biennale is arguably the most prestigious event in the international visual arts calendar. This article examines the impact that appearing in the Venice Biennale has on artists' careers. With a sample of 98 artists from six countries who participated in the Biennale in the 20 years between 1997 and 2017, we used data relating to artists' exhibition activi…
Controversy, uncertainty and the diverse public in cultural diplomacy
In the past few years, foreign policy tensions between China and Australia have become especially fraught. In some cases, this political situation manifests in the very diplomatic initiatives that were funded to help ease relations. This article considers a case study of a theatrical collaboration in the context of contemporary Australia–China relations to interrogate the value of our understandings of and evaluation frameworks for public diploma…
Reflections on Audience Data and Research
Reinstating the artist's voice
Claire Bishop argued that the ethical lens applied to socially engaged arts practice encourages 'authorial renunciation' in favour of collaboration and limits the opportunity to expose such practice to critical reception. This article responds to Bishop's implicit call to envision an artist-centred framework for participatory arts by identifying the motivations and beneficial discoveries that artists make when they seek out the creative involveme…
The problem with permanence is that you’re stuck with it’
Dedicated arts centres were a common outcome of the great expansion of the public sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the early twenty-first century, however, many of our arts centres present a challenge to cultural policy-making. Expensive to maintain and operate, they are often ill-equipped to host the increasingly diverse range of communities and arts practices that have emerged with each generation. The article outlines the d…
Accounting for quality
Arts policy has a longstanding relationship with the concept of “quality” and the ways in which organisations measure, evaluate and account for it. Culture Counts, an evaluation system and digital platform, compiles data from standardised evaluation surveys of different stakeholder groups – organisations, audiences, critics, funders and peers – and provides the means to compare and triangulate data in an accessible format. As a result, it claims …
The cut-through concept
As a consequence of the opportunities provided by international film festivals and the perceived limitations of conventional distribution, Australian independent producers find new ways to engage audiences through film festival involvement and targeted use of social media. This article examines this phenomenon with a case study of Closer Productions' 52 Tuesdays. With investment from the South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Fes…
More Yuppy Stuff Coming Soon’
Responding to gentrification has become a key planning issue for many urban municipalities. Local governments need to balance the often-competing agendas of urban regeneration, social inclusion and arts access and participation. This paper argues that arts and cultural units within local government bear the impact of such tensions. More importantly, however, local government policies and their implementation represent a third position in the pola…
The Advantage of Proximity
The arts and cultural sector has historically relied on funding from state and federal levels of government. Increasingly, however, local government has become a source of distinctive cultural policy making and a provider of significant funding for arts and cultural activities. The paper notes the relative absence of analyses of the role of local government in policy literature. It argues that with the recent proliferation of dedicated local cult…
New modes of arts participation and the limits of cultural indicators for local government
The Audience Experience
The reader as audience
n\t\t\t\t\tThe contemporary popularity of the writers' festival might appear something of a contradiction, given that such festivals are based around an art form that has been chiefly a solitary experience for the reader for several centuries. Taking the 2009 Eye of the Storm Writers' Festival in Alice Springs as its case study, this article examines the motivations of the audience for participating in community-based writers' festivals. Intervie…
Being and Becoming
In this article, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow examine the ways in which performing arts companies and arts policy institutions perceive the needs of children as audiences. Historically, children have been promoted as arts audiences. Some of these represent an attempt to fashion the adults of the future – as audiences, citizens of a nation, or members of a specific community. Other rationales focus on the needs or rights of the child, such as ed…
The state of play
Opportunities for children to experience the arts are burgeoning around the world, and many nations have put into place cultural policies that foster these opportunities. In Australia, an existing children’s cultural policy has been overshadowed by the 2009 Protocols for Artists Working with Children: a political response to a public controversy around a photography exhibition featuring naked girls. This article argues that these protocols functi…
Measuring the intrinsic benefits of arts attendance
n\t\t\t\t\tThere is an emerging dissatisfaction with the current evaluative regimes for the quality and effectiveness of funded arts organizations. Far too much evaluation rests on audience satisfaction surveys and quantitative measures of audience attendance numbers, production numbers and revenue sources. The intrinsic benefits of the arts to audiences and to society are recognized to be of major importance, but the means to measure these in an…
Building Capacity or Burning Out? Supporting Indigenous Performing Artists and Filmmakers
Public support for both Indigenous filmmaking and the live performing arts has a number of common features: at a national level the present schemes were introduced in the early 1990s, and both sets of schemes aim to improve the capacity of Indigenous practitioners to tell their stories to national and international audiences. Yet, in the late 2000s, Screen Australia's support for filmmaking has contributed to well-known successes, whereas Austral…
Culture for or by the child? 'Children's culture' and cultural policy
Measuring the intrinsic benefits of arts attendance
n\t\t\t\t\tThere is an emerging dissatisfaction with the current evaluative regimes for the quality and effectiveness of funded arts organizations. Far too much evaluation rests on audience satisfaction surveys and quantitative measures of audience attendance numbers, production numbers and revenue sources. The intrinsic benefits of the arts to audiences and to society are recognized to be of major importance, but the means to measure these in an…
New modes of arts participation and the limits of cultural indicators for local government
The Advantage of Proximity
The arts and cultural sector has historically relied on funding from state and federal levels of government. Increasingly, however, local government has become a source of distinctive cultural policy making and a provider of significant funding for arts and cultural activities. The paper notes the relative absence of analyses of the role of local government in policy literature. It argues that with the recent proliferation of dedicated local cult…
The new arts leader
One consequence of the development of cultural policy has been a demand for more creative leadership in arts organisations. This article provides a case study of how leadership of the Australia Council changed from the 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century. It argues that changes to the way in which Australia Council chairs approached their role was shaped by, and contributed to, the trend towards constructing the arts as an industry. Part o…
More Yuppy Stuff Coming Soon’
Responding to gentrification has become a key planning issue for many urban municipalities. Local governments need to balance the often-competing agendas of urban regeneration, social inclusion and arts access and participation. This paper argues that arts and cultural units within local government bear the impact of such tensions. More importantly, however, local government policies and their implementation represent a third position in the pola…
Instrumentalism and the ‘helping’ discourse
Indigenous arts are significant to the way Australia is represented to the world. Since the early 1970s Indigenous cultural policies, at both federal and state levels, have helped to shape the development of Indigenous performing arts in Australia. Over this period, cultural policies, in confluence with the aims of Indigenous artists and civil rights activists, have produced and reproduced instrumentalist rationales for the support of Indigenous …
Who Did You Meet at the Venice Biennale? Education-to-Work Transition Enhancers for Aspiring Arts Professionals in Australia
Precarious employment and unpaid labour are common features of the cultural and creative industries. While existing literature highlights the benefit of professional development in building careers, it focuses on self-driven rather than formalised activities. Social capital and social disadvantage are recognised as major factors limiting career success. Yet, it is unclear whether formalised professional development programs offer advantages to ov…
Accounting for quality
Arts policy has a longstanding relationship with the concept of “quality” and the ways in which organisations measure, evaluate and account for it. Culture Counts, an evaluation system and digital platform, compiles data from standardised evaluation surveys of different stakeholder groups – organisations, audiences, critics, funders and peers – and provides the means to compare and triangulate data in an accessible format. As a result, it claims …
The reader as audience
n\t\t\t\t\tThe contemporary popularity of the writers' festival might appear something of a contradiction, given that such festivals are based around an art form that has been chiefly a solitary experience for the reader for several centuries. Taking the 2009 Eye of the Storm Writers' Festival in Alice Springs as its case study, this article examines the motivations of the audience for participating in community-based writers' festivals. Intervie…
How Australian industry policy shaped cultural policy
Public policies that aim to facilitate cultural activities to serve effectively as industries are often regarded as a new phenomenon. This article argues that arts and cultural policies in Australia have reflected and complemented Commonwealth industry policy for most of their history. The significant change that has happened in the past twenty years is not so much a change to cultural policy, but rather a change in the notion of industries and t…
Collecting and classifying data on audience identity
This article investigates the issues and tensions involved in collecting data from audiences to describe their diversity. It uses data collected as part of a survey of festival audiences to examine (1) how people choose to describe their identity in an open-text question and (2) how classifying complex responses to questions about ethnic or cultural background has implications for analysis. First, data provided through an open-text question in th…
Beyond the “good story” and sales history
In recent years, critics’ attention has been drawn to a persistent lack of diversity in the publishing industry. These claims are based on ethnic and cultural homogeneity amongst authors, publishing company staff and content. While scholars have pointed to the role that publishers’ decision-making processes have played in reinforcing a lack of diversity, this article focuses on how such processes position the audience, and how they contribute to …
Is there a 'Venice Effect'? Participation in the Venice Biennale and the implications for artists' careers
Prestige is widely considered to positively influence the careers of artists, and the Venice Biennale is arguably the most prestigious event in the international visual arts calendar. This article examines the impact that appearing in the Venice Biennale has on artists' careers. With a sample of 98 artists from six countries who participated in the Biennale in the 20 years between 1997 and 2017, we used data relating to artists' exhibition activi…
Controversy, uncertainty and the diverse public in cultural diplomacy
In the past few years, foreign policy tensions between China and Australia have become especially fraught. In some cases, this political situation manifests in the very diplomatic initiatives that were funded to help ease relations. This article considers a case study of a theatrical collaboration in the context of contemporary Australia–China relations to interrogate the value of our understandings of and evaluation frameworks for public diploma…
Reflections on Audience Data and Research
Reinstating the artist's voice
Claire Bishop argued that the ethical lens applied to socially engaged arts practice encourages 'authorial renunciation' in favour of collaboration and limits the opportunity to expose such practice to critical reception. This article responds to Bishop's implicit call to envision an artist-centred framework for participatory arts by identifying the motivations and beneficial discoveries that artists make when they seek out the creative involveme…
Honour bound in Australia
The imprisonment and trial of Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks catalysed widespread public debate in Australia over issues of nationalism and citizenship. This article discusses the competing forms of nationalism that underpinned this debate, especially critical nationalism, which evidences both a critique of and caring for the nation. Following Ghassan Hage's notion of the dichotomy between national caring and worrying, the article looks at a…
The new arts leader
One consequence of the development of cultural policy has been a demand for more creative leadership in arts organisations. This article provides a case study of how leadership of the Australia Council changed from the 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century. It argues that changes to the way in which Australia Council chairs approached their role was shaped by, and contributed to, the trend towards constructing the arts as an industry. Part o…
Turning Victoria into cultural capital
n\t\t\t\t\tCultural developments in Victoria represent an example of the industry approach to the arts, which guides contemporary public cultural policy. This approach evolved many years back but it is clearly expressed in the Kennett government’s cultural policy document. \n\t\t\t\t
How Australian industry policy shaped cultural policy
Public policies that aim to facilitate cultural activities to serve effectively as industries are often regarded as a new phenomenon. This article argues that arts and cultural policies in Australia have reflected and complemented Commonwealth industry policy for most of their history. The significant change that has happened in the past twenty years is not so much a change to cultural policy, but rather a change in the notion of industries and t…
Honour bound in Australia
The imprisonment and trial of Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks catalysed widespread public debate in Australia over issues of nationalism and citizenship. This article discusses the competing forms of nationalism that underpinned this debate, especially critical nationalism, which evidences both a critique of and caring for the nation. Following Ghassan Hage's notion of the dichotomy between national caring and worrying, the article looks at a…
Instrumentalism and the ‘helping’ discourse
Indigenous arts are significant to the way Australia is represented to the world. Since the early 1970s Indigenous cultural policies, at both federal and state levels, have helped to shape the development of Indigenous performing arts in Australia. Over this period, cultural policies, in confluence with the aims of Indigenous artists and civil rights activists, have produced and reproduced instrumentalist rationales for the support of Indigenous …
Measuring the intrinsic benefits of arts attendance
n\t\t\t\t\tThere is an emerging dissatisfaction with the current evaluative regimes for the quality and effectiveness of funded arts organizations. Far too much evaluation rests on audience satisfaction surveys and quantitative measures of audience attendance numbers, production numbers and revenue sources. The intrinsic benefits of the arts to audiences and to society are recognized to be of major importance, but the means to measure these in an…
Building Capacity or Burning Out? Supporting Indigenous Performing Artists and Filmmakers
Public support for both Indigenous filmmaking and the live performing arts has a number of common features: at a national level the present schemes were introduced in the early 1990s, and both sets of schemes aim to improve the capacity of Indigenous practitioners to tell their stories to national and international audiences. Yet, in the late 2000s, Screen Australia's support for filmmaking has contributed to well-known successes, whereas Austral…
Culture for or by the child? 'Children's culture' and cultural policy
Being and Becoming
In this article, Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow examine the ways in which performing arts companies and arts policy institutions perceive the needs of children as audiences. Historically, children have been promoted as arts audiences. Some of these represent an attempt to fashion the adults of the future – as audiences, citizens of a nation, or members of a specific community. Other rationales focus on the needs or rights of the child, such as ed…
The state of play
Opportunities for children to experience the arts are burgeoning around the world, and many nations have put into place cultural policies that foster these opportunities. In Australia, an existing children’s cultural policy has been overshadowed by the 2009 Protocols for Artists Working with Children: a political response to a public controversy around a photography exhibition featuring naked girls. This article argues that these protocols functi…
The reader as audience
n\t\t\t\t\tThe contemporary popularity of the writers' festival might appear something of a contradiction, given that such festivals are based around an art form that has been chiefly a solitary experience for the reader for several centuries. Taking the 2009 Eye of the Storm Writers' Festival in Alice Springs as its case study, this article examines the motivations of the audience for participating in community-based writers' festivals. Intervie…
The Audience Experience
More Yuppy Stuff Coming Soon’
Responding to gentrification has become a key planning issue for many urban municipalities. Local governments need to balance the often-competing agendas of urban regeneration, social inclusion and arts access and participation. This paper argues that arts and cultural units within local government bear the impact of such tensions. More importantly, however, local government policies and their implementation represent a third position in the pola…
The Advantage of Proximity
The arts and cultural sector has historically relied on funding from state and federal levels of government. Increasingly, however, local government has become a source of distinctive cultural policy making and a provider of significant funding for arts and cultural activities. The paper notes the relative absence of analyses of the role of local government in policy literature. It argues that with the recent proliferation of dedicated local cult…
New modes of arts participation and the limits of cultural indicators for local government
The cut-through concept
As a consequence of the opportunities provided by international film festivals and the perceived limitations of conventional distribution, Australian independent producers find new ways to engage audiences through film festival involvement and targeted use of social media. This article examines this phenomenon with a case study of Closer Productions' 52 Tuesdays. With investment from the South Australian Film Corporation and the Adelaide Film Fes…
The problem with permanence is that you’re stuck with it’
Dedicated arts centres were a common outcome of the great expansion of the public sphere in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the early twenty-first century, however, many of our arts centres present a challenge to cultural policy-making. Expensive to maintain and operate, they are often ill-equipped to host the increasingly diverse range of communities and arts practices that have emerged with each generation. The article outlines the d…
Accounting for quality
Arts policy has a longstanding relationship with the concept of “quality” and the ways in which organisations measure, evaluate and account for it. Culture Counts, an evaluation system and digital platform, compiles data from standardised evaluation surveys of different stakeholder groups – organisations, audiences, critics, funders and peers – and provides the means to compare and triangulate data in an accessible format. As a result, it claims …
Controversy, uncertainty and the diverse public in cultural diplomacy
In the past few years, foreign policy tensions between China and Australia have become especially fraught. In some cases, this political situation manifests in the very diplomatic initiatives that were funded to help ease relations. This article considers a case study of a theatrical collaboration in the context of contemporary Australia–China relations to interrogate the value of our understandings of and evaluation frameworks for public diploma…
Reflections on Audience Data and Research
Reinstating the artist's voice
Claire Bishop argued that the ethical lens applied to socially engaged arts practice encourages 'authorial renunciation' in favour of collaboration and limits the opportunity to expose such practice to critical reception. This article responds to Bishop's implicit call to envision an artist-centred framework for participatory arts by identifying the motivations and beneficial discoveries that artists make when they seek out the creative involveme…
Ownvoices, Disruptive Platforms, and Reader Reception in Young Adult Publishing
The concept of #ownvoices writing has gained traction in contemporary publishing as both a genre of reader interest and a focus for debates about authors’ rights to write cross-culturally. This paper examines tensions the #ownvoices movement reveals between the commissioning, publishing, and critical reception of a book, using debate about Craig Silvey’s Honeybee , an Australian novel focalized through a young trans protagonist but written by a s…
Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts
Beyond the “good story” and sales history
In recent years, critics’ attention has been drawn to a persistent lack of diversity in the publishing industry. These claims are based on ethnic and cultural homogeneity amongst authors, publishing company staff and content. While scholars have pointed to the role that publishers’ decision-making processes have played in reinforcing a lack of diversity, this article focuses on how such processes position the audience, and how they contribute to …
Is there a 'Venice Effect'? Participation in the Venice Biennale and the implications for artists' careers
Prestige is widely considered to positively influence the careers of artists, and the Venice Biennale is arguably the most prestigious event in the international visual arts calendar. This article examines the impact that appearing in the Venice Biennale has on artists' careers. With a sample of 98 artists from six countries who participated in the Biennale in the 20 years between 1997 and 2017, we used data relating to artists' exhibition activi…
Political science (26 works) · Sociology (24 works) · Cultural Industries and Urban Development (22 works) · Law (20 works) · The arts (20 works) · Visual arts (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Cultural policy (11 works) · Economics (9 works)