Last month, Dr Kathrin Schmidt won the ENCATC (European network on cultural management and policy) Research Award 2022 for her PhD research ‘Performing Salone: The impact of local and global flows on the aesthetics and ecology of contemporary Krio theatre in Sierra Leone’. Kathrin completed her PhD last year, under the supervision of Dr Shela Sheikh at the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies and Dr Carla Figueira at ICCE.
Her thesis analysed contemporary Krio theatre in Sierra Leone (‘Salone’ in the country’s lingua franca Krio) within the context of local and global flows of people, media, images, technologies, finance and ideas, and ensuing hybridisation. Based on extensive qualitative research in Sierra Leone, read through the lens of postcolonial cultural studies, cultural policy and political economy, the thesis examines the development of cultural and creative industries from the perspective of Sierra Leonean theatre in the context of macro- and microcosmic processes and in particular in relation to the development industry (currently the main funder of Krio theatre activities). Her thesis thus highlights the interconnectedness and relationships between the micro and the macro-levels of cultural production, between the local and the global and between aesthetics, politics, policy, economy, governance structures and history.
Despite the enormously rich and diverse cultural life across Africa, there is not enough research to help understand how cultural productions in diverse African contexts can be better supported, so that artists can help change narratives and shape futures while earning a good living. So it is very good to see more thorough empirical work on the arts in a specific African context and in relation to the social, political and economic conditions they are embedded in and shaped by.
Kathrin’s findings do not pretend to suggest a magic formula to ‘save’ theatre in Sierra Leone, but rather analyses how theatre and its wider ecology link to and represent our complex and globalised world. She offers poignant examples of the impact of local and global flows and of the current political economy – especially within the context of globalisation and commodification – on the policy, structural and institutional framework for theatre and cultural production more broadly in Sierra Leone; such as the disproportionally large role that international institutions play in the current ecology of culture in Sierra Leone, which gives them a de facto policy-making authority. As such, her research offers interesting insights into the global system that we currently live in, shaped by colonialism, its legacies and neoliberal globalisation, and stresses the importance and value of diverse epistemologies and the decolonisation of dominant discourses and practices in the fields of both culture and international development.
Congratulations, Kathrin, for winning the ENCATC award!