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urn:uuid:2d928244-b4c7-495d-8655-75138cef5754 03 15 9781951399429 00 EB E101 10 10 02 28326202 01 02 Media Manifold Series 01 01 Defund Culture A Radical Proposal 1 A01 Gary Hall Gary Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts and Executive Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. His work sits at the intersection of critical theory, media philosophy, and cultural politics. He is the author of Culture in Bits (2002), Digitize This Book! (2008), and Pirate Philosophy (2016), and co‑founder of the open-access journal Culture Machine and Open Humanities Press. 01 eng 00 97 03 10 ART037000 23 Cultural studies 23 Federal government 10 POL028000 23 Cultural policies & debates 10 POL038000 01 06 03 00 Calls to expand public investment in the arts often treat the existing cultural and institutional landscape as a given. Defund Culture challenges this assumption, asking instead what kinds of culture are being supported, through which institutions, and to whose benefit.In pursuing these questions, the book turns attention to the structural inequalities that shape Britain’s creative and intellectual life. Drawing on critical theory, political philosophy, and cultural policy, Gary Hall shows how the dominance of white, male, middle- and upper-class voices in the arts, media, and academy is sustained through longstanding funding arrangements and institutional hierarchies. Expanding access within this system—however well intentioned—will not, on its own, produce structural change.Rather than offering a programme of reform, Defund Culture explores what it might mean to disinvest from cultural institutions as they currently operate. Taking cues from abolitionist calls to defund the police, Hall proposes redistributing resources away from elite institutions and toward more collective, commons-oriented, and radically relational alternatives grounded in redistribution, institutional transformation, and epistemic pluriversality. 04 00 PART 1: WHY THE ARTS ARE SO WHITE, MALE, AND MIDDLE-CLASS Chapter One: The Culture Wars and Attack on the Arts Chapter Two: Culture Must Be ['Defended' Struck-Through] Defunded Chapter Three: Culture in Ruins: "Are We the Bad Guys?" PART 2: AND HERE’S SOME OF THE THINGS WE CAN DO ABOUT IT Chapter Four: Culture and the University as White, Male, Liberal Humanist Public Space Chapter Five: De-Liberalizing Culture and Theory Chapter Six: Coda References mediastudies.press 01 mediastudies.press 04 01 20260105 02 WORLD 06 15 9781951399436 06 15 9781951399405 06 15 9781951399412 06 15 9781951399429 WORLD 09 mediastudies.press 20 01