Creative and Cultural Ecology Connections Among Commercial,
Not-For-Profit and Fringe Theatres

Manfredi De Bernard

PhD Candidate

Manfredi De Bernard

PhD Candidate

I am a PhD candidate at KCL funded by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. My research focuses on the promising and yet underexplored notion of Creative and Cultural Ecology. The framework recognises the complementary modalities and value(s) of creative production and consumption while questioning both the primacy given to narrow economic-led imperatives and the mechanistic understanding of the sector of previous research and models. To empirically prove the notion, I am mapping and investigating theatre professionals’ flows between the private, public and not-for-profit spheres through network analysis and interviews.

The PhD’s contributions aim to be: theoretical, mapping current definitions and literature to establish a stronger theoretical grounding; methodological, testing curriculum vitae analysis and mixed-method network analysis as a tool for exploration in CC ecology; empirical, describing the relationships between the private, public and not-for-profit sphere in the theatre sector and the influences they exert on the work network, also including considerations on intersectional inequalities.

Connected to the PhD project’s collaborative nature in partnership with Creative United, the PhD aims to provide policy implications of the listed contributions for the sector and organisations that aim to support its development.

Manfredi de Bernard is a PhD student at King’s College London. In 2019 he was awarded a LAHP/AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award supported by King’s College London in partnership with Creative United.

In his research, Manfredi employs network science and interviews to expand the current knowledge about the UK theatre ecology. In particular, he is looking at the network of workers to understand their interactions with commercial, not-for-profit and fringe theatres in the country.

Theatre is its workers and progress towards the understating of the sector would be hardly possible and deeply unfair without them. So it seemed natural to explore and model the theatre ecology by looking at how the workers behave, their career paths, the difficulties they face and how they collaborate.

The research project is producing evidence to finally recognise workers’ central role in the sector, which has been dramatically overlooked, and not just in the last two years. The whole project thus sits between research and advocacy as we hoped will help inform public policy towards culture and recognise interconnections and synergies in a more consistent and transparent way.

The research is mixed-method: Manfredi is building the workers’ collaboration network from resumes and concurrently interviewing theatre workers of any profile to understand their working conditions, the inequalities happening in the sector, and how differently they engage with different elements of the theatre ecosystem.

As industry partner for this study, Creative United is supporting Manfredi with access to contacts and knowledge within the creative and cultural industries to assist him with his research – from networks and databases, to survey information and policy, consultation and research reports.

Do you work within the theatre sector?

We are helping Manfredi to get in contact with people working within the sector to set up one interview and make a valuable contribution to this research. Click on the button below to fill out one brief survey to provide your contacts details for him to get quickly in touch with you and arrange a meeting together. You can click on Manfredi’s profile to the left to find out more about his research.

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