This morning, the Boekman Foundation announced the shortlist for the Boekman Dissertation Prize. After a careful process, three dissertation writers have now been selected from the longlist of nine dissertations to stand a chance of winning the prestigious prize, which will be awarded for the sixth time. The winner will be announced in April 2025 at the conference Culture as Problem Solver, in collaboration withErasmus University Rotterdam and the Landelijk Netwerk Cultuurbeleid.
The Boekman Dissertation Prize, awarded triennially, recognises exceptional dissertations on arts and culture policy and the social context of arts and culture. Together with the Social Sciences and Humanities domain of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), the Boekman Foundation aims with this prize to draw attention to pioneering research and stimulate new research initiatives. The nominees for the Boekman Dissertation Prize 2025 are (in alphabetical order):
Pieter Bots: A valuable judgement - University of Amsterdam.
This thesis examines how the concept of artistic quality has been interpreted in Dutch cultural policy since 1993. Bots developed a model from four perspectives on the value of art and analyses how committees apply this concept in subsidy decisions, arguing for a broader interpretation.
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Esther Hammelburg: Being there live - University of Amsterdam.
This thesis explores how "liveness" is created in people's media use practices during contemporary cultural events. The work contributes both practical knowledge about live media use and theoretical understanding of the construction of live experiences and how our social world is shaped with and through media.
Kirsten Schipper: Architecture as a cultural act - University of Groningen.
This thesis describes the rise and fall of the Dutch central government's architectural policy. The study focuses on the development of the central government's architectural policy as a form of cultural policy, shedding light on how the policy and thus the dominant views on Dutch culture were formulated and constantly evolving.
The winner receives a cash prize of ten thousand euros, intended for a research-related activity. There is also publicity attention for the work in Boekman magazine.
In its assessment, the jury considered the social relevance of the dissertation for the cultural sector, its scientific quality and the writers' motivation for applying for the prize. The jury for this edition consists of jury president Susanne Janssen, professor of Media and Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Odile Heynders, professor of Comparative Literature at Tilburg University, Gabri van Tussenbroek, professor of urban identity and monuments at the University of Amsterdam; Femke van Hest, strategic advisor culture municipality of Den Bosch and Toef Jaeger, art editor at NRC.
About the Boekman Dissertation Prize
The Boekman Dissertation Prize was first awarded in 2009 and is named after Emanuel Boekman, the namesake of the Boekman Foundation, who received his doctorate in 1939. His dissertation Overheid en kunst in Nederland has become a classic in cultural policy thinking. In 2022, Yosha Wijngaarden won the 5th Boekman Dissertation Prize with her dissertation Spaces of co-working: situating innovation in the creative industries. In it, she turned her gaze to the locations where, at the micro level, the practice of creative workers develops: incubators, hubs and creative gathering buildings.
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