Programming Process Pedagogy: Towards Meaningful Audience Engagement and Public Participation Models Within Contemporary Canadian Media Arts Festival, 2012-2024

The 2010s are remembered as a decade of interventionist participative engagements that were led in large part by youth- and collective-oriented forms of meaningful online civic activism. Motivated by affective politics of belonging, these movements also contributed to building lucrative neoliberal participation-based social media platforms, powered by algorithms of misinformation. During this time, the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) published a formative 2012 Discussion Paper entitled “Public Engagement in the Arts,” which encouraged Canadian cultural programming to consciously engage more public audiences in the social aspects of the arts through programming updates that more readily facilitated co-creation, learning, cultural mediation, and creative self-expression.

I engage with this heightened period of participative affect to investigate the social, economic, and civic impacts of “meaningful engagement” programming within the Canadian independent media arts ecosystem from the early 2010s to the mid 2020s. Led in large part by participative curatorial tactics, this dissertation investigates how these directives impacted concentrated groups of identity-based communities and changed a number of programming parameters within Canadian media arts festivals. Demonstrating how participation narratives have become central curatorial tactics within contemporary Canadian media arts film festivals, I posit a theoretical intervention in the Canadian media arts festival ecosystem. It considers the boundaries, stakes, and directives for publics, audiences, and creative ecology ecosystems across these festival initiatives.

Working through ethnographic life-story research that is contextualized within discursive cultural policy analysis, this dissertation presents original research from four primary media arts festival case studies to present a contemporary theory of screen engagement called “public process pedagogy.” I argue that this theory of participation is not only found but expected within granting and programming directives for contemporary community-based media-arts festivals within Canada. Importantly, I do not consider or judge this theory of participation from a moral perspective. Rather, I recognize how public process pedagogy is influenced by complicated neoliberal and settler-colonial tensions. In turn, this dissertation presents more sustainable frameworks of evaluation for participation-based programming within this contemporary media arts ecosystem.