RACHEL SKAGGS
Selected Courses Taught
ARTEDUC 7200.2 Overview of Research and Planning for Arts Policy and Administration
In recent years, “big data,” statistics, surveys, and quantitative measures are seemingly ubiquitous. Whether they measure the so-called “butts in seats” of arts participation, student test scores, or culture industry revenue, quantitative data drives decision-making, budgets, and organizational priorities across the arts and culture sector. The importance of quantitative measures to influence understandings of the role of arts in society will continue be important for scholars, leaders, and educators in the field. This class will expose students to a variety of ways of understanding, collecting, and making inferences using quantitative data with the goal of using quantitative insights to contribute to theory and to inform cultural and/or educational policy.
ARTEDUC 7711 Designing and Writing Research Proposals
This course is designed to assist in understanding the nature and purpose of the dissertation proposal as well as the strategies necessary to conceive of it and construct it.
ARTEDUC 5795 The Social World of the Arts
We often think about the arts as primarily aesthetic endeavors, but the social world around the creation, production, distribution, and reception of art are key in understanding the role of art and of artists in society. In this class, students will use a sociological lens to examine how individuals and groups create, produce, distribute, and consume art. The themes of this course will allow us to answer questions like, but not limited to, the following: Why to trends in the arts happen when they do? Why is “selling out” looked down on by so-called “starving artists”? Can we predict which pieces of art will become popular? How does an artist’s gender or race impact their reception among critics? Using this lens to think about art, we will consider a wide variety of genres of art, arts scenes, and cultural products including TV scripts, fiction books, rap cyphers, stand-up comics, record label interns, high-priced modern art, and artist activists whose work creates social value.
ARTEDUC 4495 Arts Entrepreneurship
Unlike traditional entrepreneurship education, which focuses only on economic value, identifying opportunities in the arts can take on aspects of social entrepreneurship to address social problems, cultural entrepreneurship that focuses on aesthetic value, as well as economic value. Arts students are often discouraged from pursuing a career in the arts because of the perception that they will have low incomes, but the skills of entrepreneurship, particularly within the Meaningful Inquiry framework, will allow students to gain skills toward using their creativity and artistic skill to solve problems, identify their personal sites of expertise, and work toward having a fulfilling and economically viable career using their arts degree from Ohio State.