About the initiative | ORGANIZING TEAM | Culture Kettle
Culture Kettle is a new accelerator for knowledge and progress in the cultural sphere, broadly defined. How new? The Evolving Culture of Science Engagement is Culture Kettle’s inaugural project and will set the template: First, gather pioneering practitioners and thinkers to ask big, fundamental questions about how public participation is changing. Then work to answer to those questions through research and experimentation. The idea is to step outside of traditional categories and hierarchies and look at culture as a single complex system, so we can contribute genuinely new insights that lead to greater relevance, resilience, and diversity. From art, science, media, music, and museums to food, sustainability, entertainment, urban design, and community development, we'll spell culture without the capital “C,” shining light not just on nonprofit, institutional participation but on all the ways people explore, express, connect, learn and play today.
Culture Kettle was founded by cultural audience researcher Peter Linett as a nonprofit spinoff of his work with arts organizations, museums, public media, and foundations. Tackling a wide range of evolutionary cultural questions in an overlapping series of multi-year initiatives, Culture Kettle will bring together forward-looking creators, distributors, funders, and scholars to challenge each other and reframe the conversation, then collaborate to figure out how things operate in that new frame—and what else is possible—by conducting fresh, creative empirical research. Finally, Culture Kettle will partner with cultural producers and researchers to incubate and study those new possibilities in live, public programming experiments. The result will be a more nimble, adaptive cultural domain and a more valuable range of cultural options for more kinds of people.
Culture Kettle’s website is under development. For more information, email Linett or fill out our contact form.
Read about the MIT departments and units partnering with Culture Kettle on the initiative.
