N1 - Maggie Cronin is an actress, playwright and director currently undertaking a PhD at Queen’s University Belfast. Culture Is Bad for You is clearly intended as a contribution to public debate, not just academic discussion. Please note: Selecting permissions does not provide access to the full text of the article, please see our help page How do I view content? COVID has exposed and reinforced the longstanding, embedded, structural inequalities that characterise the cultural sector.

In the UK, the press is full of tales of culture in crisis, with redundancies sitting alongside potential organisational and business failures.The colour of a scarf, the accent of a conversation, can unite people or divide them, and the smallest detail can play its part in signalling who are allies and who are enemies, as much for elites as for citizens in a democracy.

Henna tells us some of our reasons why we’ve written this book, and why we’ve given it the provocative title of Culture is bad for you.

Having said that I do believe everyone who works in the industry should read it because it’s only through understanding the inequalities can we begin to work on change. They explore how jobs in the arts and how the consumption of culture are affected by economic, racial and gender inequalities, shaping the cultural world we all live in. This isn't the whole story (and the book flags up the exceptions), but the data is well collected and presents a difficult to defend tale about the making of national identity by the select few. I would like to see a broader understanding of how so many of the practices that are kind of standard are, in fact, problematic and make the sector much less available to people who don’t have a privileged background.

Dr Brook’s work attracted impact accelerator backing for Arts Emergency’s Youth Collective of young creatives in their early 20s aiming to work in CCIs. Vaccinating Britain investigates the relationship between the British public and vaccination policy since 1945. It’s easy to blame broader structures for the inequalities in the sector, rather than taking responsibility.Of course, this isn’t deterministic: we’re not saying that every single working-class person walking into an opera house will feel uncomfortable and won’t come back.

The result is as much a manifesto for change as well as a valuable addition to scholarship countering the ‘celebratory discourse’ in relation to the CCIs over the past 25 years. Moreover, they did not always act uniformly, with “the public” capable of expressing contradictory demands that were often at odds with official policy. A few different policies would get at this: regulation of the private rented sector to look more like Germany; far more socially rented housing to look more like Austria; more homes being built so that housing is no longer such a scarce resource. She reflected on the reasons that, despite her obvious talent and track record, she had not hit the same heights as some of her contemporaries.Essential reading for citizens, policy makers, employers, artists and fans - and for those who study them. We will see how the workforce in cultural occupations is deeply unequal, with class, race, and gender constituting crucial axes of inequality.