Nanna Kann-Rasmussen

My research regards cultural institutions and cultural policy. I am particularly interested in the relationship between cultural institutions and society. This relation affects how cultural institutions legitimize themselves, the leadership and organization of the cultural institutions and how they change. In recent years, I have contributed to this research agenda by scrutinizing how cultural institutions (such as libraries, archives, and museums) have emphasized their users, social relevance, their ability to collaborate and how some employees in these institutions even describe their activities as activism. Furthermore, I have contributed to the research agenda on legitimation work of cultural institutions by showing that display of projects, networks and “social good” now dominate LAM-institutions’ self-justifications as much as their emphasis on quality. Recently I have introduced theories of New Public Governance (NPG - a governance regime influenced by collaborative innovation as the answer to society’s problems as opposed to New Public Management) to the field of cultural policy, to find out what NPG entails for the rationales and justifications of cultural policy. Furthermore, I want to initiate a discussion about what possible new rationales and justifications entails for the way we understand the field of [instrumental] cultural policy today.

Current research project

From september 2024-juni 2029 I am leading the research project Post- neutrality in Libraries, Archives and Museums, which is supported by the Velux foundation.

I teach the masters programme in Information Studies in courses on cultural policy, cultural institutions and cultural mediation.