Racialized Neoliberal Philanthropy: Examining Arts for Social Change Grantmaking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Major philanthropic organizations are increasingly calling on the arts to address what they deem to be pressing societal injustices. Advocates argue that this “social turn” in arts philanthropy is a product of two things: 1) new empirical evidence regarding the social impact of the arts; and 2) an increasingly progressive philanthropic community. This article forwards another possible explanation. Focusing on the Canadian context, I situate art for social change [AFSC] philanthropy within successive eras of racialized neoliberal capitalist development, with a specific focus on the rise of venture philanthropy post-2008. I examine how ideological and political-economic shifts have created a set of material and discursive conditions that disproportionately impact poor racialized communities, while simultaneously producing these same communities as attractive areas of “investment” for a changing roster of philanthropic donors. Drawing on a range of case studies, I show how the rise of the AFSC as a strategic philanthropic funding category points to a series of alarming ideological shifts, including the erosion of social rights in Canada, the de-politicization of racialized poverty in Canada, and corporate capital’s co-optation of struggles for economic and racial justice. As a result, while AFSC philanthropy is often heralded as a progressive paradigm shift or “turn” in arts funding, it must also be understood as an extension–and technology–of a larger racialized neoliberal project. In addition to offering a critical examination of AFSC philanthropy, this paper makes a broader argument for centering questions of race in extant critical examinations of social change philanthropy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".