The ENCATC Education and Research Sessions Call for proposals has been extended to the 5th March 2026. The Congress will take place in Nice, France from the 23rd-26th September.
Artists, cultural professionals, and creative workers are facing rapid changes driven by digital technologies, ecological transitions, shifting policy environments, and new expectations around social responsibility. This call invites researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore how cultural work is evolving today — and how policy, governance, and infrastructure can better support fair, sustainable, and future-oriented careers in the cultural and creative sectors.
Cultural work continues to be shaped by precarious employment, uneven protections, and blurred boundaries between personal and professional life. These conditions differ widely across regions and policy systems, leading to unequal opportunities and diverse challenges. Many cultural professionals also work in informal networks, hybrid roles, or community-based contexts, prompting renewed debates about who counts as a cultural worker and how support systems can recognise this diversity.
Meanwhile, green cultural policies, new mobility requirements, and sustainability standards are reshaping production models and professional responsibilities, often adding pressure but also creating space for innovation.
We invite submissions in three formats:
- Research papers
- Teaching methods
- Panel proposals
Submissions may address but are not limited to:
- Status of the artist, policy frameworks, and statistical gaps:
Recognition of artistic labour, rights and protections, comparative policy approaches, and the ongoing invisibility of cultural work in official statistics. - Fair working conditions, artistic freedom, diversity and inclusion:
Precarity, wellbeing, mobility, censorship, social security, intersectionality, and equitable opportunities across identities and contexts. - Funding, entrepreneurship, and new economic models:
Public funding, philanthropy, hybrid financing, cooperative and commons-based models, and their impact on autonomy and resilience. - Creative ecosystems, infrastructures and alter-organising frameworks in the cultural and creative sectors:
The role of networks, hubs, collectives, residencies, regional ecosystems, and clusters; shared governance; mutual care; mobility and internationalisation programmes. - Cross-innovation, collaboration artistic practice as social and political engagement:
Collaboration with science, health, education, climate action, business, or technology; cultural justice; community-led and activist approaches. - Skills, competences, learning paths and lifelong training approaches:
Digital and ecological transitions, AI, evolving job profiles, transversal skills, and new approaches in higher education, vocational training, and peer learning. - Debates on cultural and creative industries (CCI) definitions and boundaries:
Classification debates, regional differences, and their implications for policy and funding. - Green policies, ecological transition and environmental responsibility in the cultural and creative sector:
How sustainability frameworks reshape cultural production, organisational practices, touring and mobility, and working conditions in the sector.
We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives from cultural policy, sociology, management, economics, arts and humanities, communication, education, and related fields.
Learn more and make a submission by 5th of March 2026 here: ENCATC Congress – Encatc
