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In episode 45 of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso continue a discussion they began in episode 42. They talk about words that are used in our fields of work: how they are used, why, and the impact they may have. This time, they focus on community, its use and misuse; intuition, discernment, and truth, three related words that hint at the search for clarity; and ident...

Paul Crook is an artist, and also head of Communities and Learning at South London Gallery. We talk about his work with young people in both community art and gallery education settings, and creative strategies to facilitate listening. Paul uses mind maps to think with young people about artworks and programmes; one young person comedically calls him a ‘Democracy Scheduler’.

Sara Selwood has worked in the publicly-funded cultural sector for over 40 years in various capacities, including as editor of the cultural policy journal Cultural Trends since it was first published in 1994. Having started out as an artist, she was an art historian and gallery director before becoming a cultural analyst and working as researcher, editor, academic and consultant. Sara Selwood has...

Guildhall De-Centre focuses on the support structures, networks and collaborations that form the basis of socially engaged practices by developing a community of researchers, practitioners, producers, teachers and administrators at Guildhall School. Sophie Hope talks to Sean Gregory and Jo Gibson about the new De-Centre for Socially Engaged Practice and Research. They discuss the roots of this ini...

Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with William Frode de la Foret, Art Director of Cork Community Art Link in Ireland for the past 30 years. Cork Community Art Link “work with people to create a sense of community identity and collective pride enabling people to learn more about themselves and the world around them all the while having fun”. Their work aims to engage people “both as parti...

Arc Theatre is an Essex-based company that uses Forum Theatre and participatory drama activities to consider tough issues with audiences. Originally founded in 1984, Arc specialises in producing and performing original, live theatre, and delivering interactive, multi-media awareness programmes. They work with children and young people in schools and with groups ranging from pensioners to asylum se...

According to their web site, “Take A Part are the UK's leading socially engaged art (SEA) organisation, dedicated to supporting, furthering and sustaining SEA practice, community co-creation and community embedding placemaking in the UK. We take a community-first approach to culture, supporting areas and people underrepresented and underserved in our society to develop cultural confidence, advocac...

Every year some months have five Fridays, and every time this happens we find something to do there: something out of our normal schedule. We try to adopt an annual theme. In 2021 we played music licensed under creative commons licences; in 2022 we found four old radio shows; and in 2023 we looked back to four early episodes of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse. This year whenever we find oursel...

Barry Sykes lives and works in Walthamstow, London. He makes sculptures, drawings and performance about authenticity, interaction and pleasure, often working at the edges of value, skill and acceptable behaviour. Recent projects have looked at fake laughter exercises, social nudity and sauna culture, using group participation and various handmade processes like cyanotype photography, life-drawing...

On episode 43 of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with France Trépanier and Chris Creighton-Kelly, based in British Columbia. France is a visual artist, curator and researcher of Kanien’kéha:ka and French ancestry; Chris is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and cultural critic born in the UK with South Asian/British roots. Together, they direct Primary Colour...

Artist Jorge Lucero is Full Professor of Art Education in the School of Art + Design. For eight years he was the Chair of the Art Education Program. Now he serves as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. Lucero studied at the Pennsylvania State University and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to being at the University of Illinois, he happily taugh...

Susan Jones worked as the director of a-n The Artists Information Company from 1980 to 2014. Her doctoral thesis Artists livelihoods: the artists in arts policy conundrum, Manchester Metropolitan University 2015-2019, exposed baseline flaws in the interrelationship between arts policies and artists’ livelihoods over the last 30 years and articulated a unique new rationale for better support to art...

On April 26 and 27, 2019, seven months before Jeremy Corbyn led the British Labour party to unexpected defeat in a general election, the Raymond Williams Society held its annual conference. Now, in July 2024, as Keir Starmer celebrates a landslide victory for the Labour party, and a new Labour government prepares its long-term agenda, we present a completely re-edited and remixed look at the sessi...

It’s episode 42 of A Culture of Possibility, which means no guest this time. Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk about some of the words commonly used in discussions of cultural democracy and community-based arts, include culture, art, authenticity and creativity. Humpty Dumpty may have said “When I use a word, it means exactly what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” but we think...

In this ninth episode of ‘Ways of Listening’, socially engaged artist and PhD researcher Alex Parry explores workshop practices in depth. Alex’s bio describes her long-term interest in ‘how things form communities’. She has a history of working in public spaces, creating events and objects that encourage collective experiences. In a conversation with Hannah Kemp-Welch Alex describes her overlappin...

According to Gregory Kyle Klug, in a review on Amazon, “Schumacher’s A Guide for the Perplexed is the author’s response to the philosophical juggernaut of materialism in the western world. In it, he exposes the intellectual and spiritual poverty of the view that man is nothing more than a naked ape with advanced computing power; that all reality and knowledge can be reduced to the objective measur...

In this episode Sophie talks to Ben Jones, founder of Dingy Butterflies, a community arts organisation based in Gateshead, in the North East of England. Ben gives us some background to the organisation and an insight into a recent citizen science and arts project called Bees of Bensham. We learn something about the myths of bees, and that while their behaviours are perhaps the antithesis of cultur...

Natalia “Nati” Linares is a cultural organizer and communications strategist who works to expand the horizons for economic fairness and stability to the creative community. Through her work as artist and communications organizer and cofounder of Art.coop, an organization that addresses inequality among artists and culture workers, she helps creatives and culture workers change conversations about...

Sound artist and composer Simon James reflects on his recent project with young people in Whitehawk, initiated as part of the Class Divide campaign - fighting against the educational attainment gap in East Brighton. Sounds recorded during workshops, both on the Whitehawk housing estate and on an adjacent archaeological site, formed part of the exhibition Neolithic Cannibals: Deep Listening to the...

Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss Solidarity Not Charity, written by Nati Linares and Caroline Woolard. This “rapid report” analyses “arts and culture grantmaking in the solidarity economy”, a term that it borrows from a long standing radical, feminist economic movement. As often, discussing parts of the report leads to a wider discussion about the issues that the report addresses. Can we assume...

Every year some months have five Fridays, and every time this happens we find something to do there: something out of our normal schedule. We try to adopt an annual theme. In 2021 we played music licensed under creative commons licences; in 2022 we found four old radio shows; and in 2023 we looked back to four early episodes of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse. This year whenever we stumble int...

This episode is a live recording of an event in which Sophie Hope talks with artists Amy Feneck and Ruth Beale. Together they reflect on 12 years of collaborative practice, spanning art, politics and the ongoing need to talk about economics. The conversation that forms the heart of this episode was recorded at an event organised by the Alternative School of Economics on 9 March 2023 at Gasworks,in...

In Culture of Possibility #40, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso interview James Thompson, Professor of Applied and Social Theatre at the University of Manchester. James Thompson was the founder In Place of War, a project researching and developing arts programs in war zones and has extensive experience working with and writing about theatre under such conditions. The project describes itself...

Practitioner and researcher Sylvan Baker examines listening within applied theatre practices. Sylvan has worked across applied theatre, socially engaged arts and education for the past 30 years, and is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Central School of Speech and Drama. He describes a process of using ‘headphone verbatim’ to share testimonies with care-experienced young people, and shows how pla...

Last month we completed a three part mini-series and asked for responses. To our surprise the ones we got did not propose digital tools but enquired about a comment in the show notes here at miaaw.net. We noted that “Rather oddly he does not mention Todoist at all despite the fact that it sits at the heart of his attempts to stay organised. He obviously didn't stay organised long enough to remembe...