Published on December 4, 2025 – Updated on December 4, 2025

We are pleased to welcome Carlotta Scioldo, who is visiting the Institute for European Studies (IEE-ULB) as a visiting researcher from 1 October to 20 December. Her stay is supervised by Professor François Foret.

With a background in Theater Studies, Urban and Regional Planning, and Cultural Policy, her research agenda focuses on European cultural policy, with particular attention to its soft policy instruments understood as operative tools that engage institutional and para-institutional actors with the aim of (re)legitimizing cultural action within a fragmented governance system.

Currently working as a researcher and lecturer at Erasmus University Rotterdam, within the Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication (ESHCC), she intends, during her visiting period at the Institute for European Studies (IEE) at ULB, to further develop her research agenda on the role of transnational cultural networks in shaping cultural governance and foresight in EU policymaking. This continues the work presented in her newly published monograph, European Networks and Cultural Governance: How Culture Makes Policy (Routledge, 2025). The book explores how cultural networks function, on the one hand, as active agents contributing to policy innovation and legitimacy in the European governance system and, on the other, as tools enabling de-politicization processes.

During the fellowship, she examines the potential and limitations of applying strategic foresight to cultural policy design. In this context, her aim is to develop a seminar titled Foresight of Culture and Culture of Foresight, which explores and debates how experimental approaches to strategic foresight can be linked to EU cultural policy. By linking public sector innovation with cultural governance scholarship and practice, the debate aims to open avenues for advancing collaborative innovation in cultural policymaking and for developing operational guidelines to promote fair participation of various stakeholders in the policy cycle.

Her affiliation with the IEE offers an invaluable interdisciplinary environment for this project, helping to better contextualize how ideas, discourse, and values embedded in the EU governance setting contribute to the construction of European cultural governance.