Call for papers: Culture, arts and the creative economy in Brazil: cultural production, markets and policy

Guest Editors: Carolina Dalla Chiesa (Arts and Culture, Erasmus University Rotterdam); Eduardo Davel (School of Management, Universidade Federal da Bahia); Anders Rykkja (School of Arts, Queen's University Belfast).

The study of cultural and artistic expressions in Brazil has undergone significant expansion in the past decade, largely due to the internationalization of academia, the effects of policymaking, and transient market dynamics in the artistic and cultural domains. However, after Dilma Rousseff’s presidential term (2011 to 2016), little has been done in terms of cultural policy interventions to support the cultural and creative sector (CCS). The current status quo is characterized by the existence and continuation of grassroots, communitarian, and traditional cultural expressions outside markets and governments. The economic and symbolic values generated by the works of other creative professionals, which require more regulation and support, are largely overlooked.
Although economically powerful, what we came to call the “creative economy” encompasses a diverse array of formal and informal careers, firms, and institutions with varying access to funds and means to ensure sustainability. In one way or another, the cultural and creative sectors (CCS) in Brazil are a polyphonic category currently serving little more than statistical aggregation for a myriad of expressions that can hardly be put together in the way they are produced and consumed. Furthermore, Brazil experiences significant cleavages when it comes to popular art and canon. Some commercial cultural expressions (like sertanejo) gather audiences at a greater speed than typical “elitist” infrastructures of the arts (e.g., galleries, museums, art house cinema, theatre, dance, and others).
For this special issue of Brazilian Creative Industries Journal, we welcome manuscripts that aim to unpack the current status and dynamics of the Brazilian creative economy from a clear empirical and theoretical standpoint. What that means is a call for empirically informed contributions that focus on for example a career, an organization, a firm, an individual, a group, or an ecosystem, as a list of non-exhaustive examples and possibilities.
We purposely focus on the pre-consumption, pre-audience phases, which means that we are more interested in the forms of production, creation and distribution that permeate the arts and culture in Brazil; less so when it comes to audiences’ tastes or consumption patterns. Some forms of creation adopt a more collective or individual organizational format, which also affects the way actors search for funding and its allocation. In this sense, we are also interested in how funding and financing impact cultural production.

Guiding questions:
This call for papers, thus, takes an interdisciplinary approach needed to unveil the complexities of the CCS from various dimensions, methods, and theoretical traditions. We welcome contributions from a variety of fields (cultural management, cultural economics, cultural policy, political economy of culture, sociology of culture, economic sociology, sociology, and anthropology of culture, etc.) interested in discussing and answering questions such as:
• How do creators (i.e., individual artists or organizations) create, produce, and distribute their works/products in Brazil? What organizational formats make such creations and productions possible?
• What are the specificities of the Brazilian case when it comes to arranging the ecosystem of the CCS? Where are they located? Which results, challenges and possibilities do these cultural ecosystems yield?
• How do the intertwined concepts of creative ecology and creative ecosystems open new directions for CCS research? Which theoretical-empirical avenues can be used to understand this phenomenon?
• How do workers, creators, independent makers, firms, and institutions navigate the complexities of policy upheavals every four years and ensure relative continuity? What forms of funding/financing ensure the supply of culture/arts/creativity in its various shapes and forms?
• Which tensions and challenges arise from working with culture in Brazil from an economic and non-economic standpoint? How do actors navigate the market needs in relation to cultural production?
• What are potential policymaking avenues? What institutional paths can be used to secure funding, financing and rewarding of the arts and cultural production in general?

Areas of interest:
Empirically, we look for contributions that clearly state their domains of interest (e.g., filmmaking, theatre, music, book publishing, etc.) and their unit of analysis (e.g., a person, a career, a group of people, a policy, a firm, an institution, an ecosystem, etc.). Studies should announce their theoretical underpinnings and traditions to give clarity to their conceptual contributions. We avoid contributions that are purely descriptive of a scene, situation, or cultural expression without reflecting on its theoretical and conceptual implications. The call for papers prefers qualitative or quantitative studies, literature reviews, theoretical essays, or historical analyses that focus on cases developed in Brazil.

Papers can be written in English or Portuguese. Contributions from and outside Brazil are welcome, provided the case studies pertain to Brazilian realities.

Papers will be split into different areas of interest and allocated to a corresponding editor who is more familiar with the theories and methods chosen by the author. Papers may have one, two or three revision rounds.

Timeline:
Abstract submissions (500 words): 20th of August 2025
Notifications of acceptance and feedback: 10th of September 2025
Full paper submission (first round): 1st of February 2026