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Policy Papers

By 2014, ICASP will have published a total of Four Policy Papers

  • Improvisation and Intellectual Property Rights: addressing current legal conceptions of the musical work and standards of originality
  • Multiculturalism and Cultural Identity: redirecting governmental policies to recognize the important role that improvisational arts play for many cultural communities and their ongoing acts of identity construction
  • Arts Funding: reconsidering the “art” categories used in determining funding allocations and questioning the tacit high art/low art evaluations encoded in existing funding structures
  • Pedagogy: influencing curriculum reform with the aim of integrating improvisational activities more fully into music education programs

In preparing these policy papers, the research working groups for these four areas also raise broader questions about the public policy process:

How does an understanding of improvisation and of improvisational practices improve upon traditional philosophical understandings of citizenship and of democratic deliberation?

Does improvisation provide us with a better way in which to integrate the diverse types of stakeholders and associated kinds of “voices” within the public policy process?

Does improvisation provide us with a better way of contending with the risk and uncertainty that attend many policy-making arenas today?

Listening itself, an improvisative act engaged in by everyone, announces a practice of active engagement with the world, where we sift, interpret, store and forget, in parallel with action and fundamentally articulated with it ("Mobilitas Animi" 113).

– George E. Lewis