‘Kind of Business, You Know?’ The Commercialisation of Inclusion through Non-formal Arts Learning

As national and global policies emphasise the significance of social inclusion, a sense of belonging has increasingly become economically rationalised. Social exclusion is posed as an economic risk, and so neoliberal systems have commercialised and commodified social inclusion, promoting a transactional and privatised approach to ‘belonging’. This issue is particularly significant in culturally diversifying urban contexts, as a desire to develop a transnational sense of belonging can be a central motivation for participants in recreational arts learning. In this article, we focus on how this economic mandate presents tensions in the non-formal arts education sector. While arts education businesses seek to gain the financial benefits of promoting a sense of belonging, they can wrestle with pedagogical philosophies that actively promote competition and hierarchies amongst learners. Our study, therefore, critically examines the experiences of migrant dance learners attending casual hip-hop classes in New Zealand. Engaging a qualitative, phenomenological research paradigm, our study gathers the personal narratives of these dance learners to reveal how the nexus of neoliberalism and inclusion is creating unresolved tensions in the hip-hop studio. While arts learning providers actively promote a sense of belonging as a dimension of their service, our study shows that learner expectations of and investment in social inclusion are confronted by prevailing studio pedagogies. This challenges common perceptions of non-formal arts education as inherently inclusive and establishes a framework for further critical research into the commodification of inclusion in the arts education sector

Art · Business · Social science · Sociology · The arts · Visual arts · Cultural Industries and Urban Development