(Odd
Numbers, Milton: Photo: NADFLY/www.cargocollective.com/nadfly)
Creative
Futures Institute, University of the West of Scotland, Paisley Campus, High Street,
Paisley PA1 2BE
Friday 1st
March 2013
9.30am
– 5.00pm
A conference exploring the findings of Remaking Society, an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Connected Communities ‘Pilot Demonstrator’ project.
Participation
in cultural activity is an essential ingredient in making healthy communities.
The Remaking Society project explores
how neighbourhoods experiencing multiple deprivation, in particular, might
harness engagement in creative activity to build capacity for social change.
The project takes a broad view of wellbeing as a social construct: that is,
more than an individual’s state of physical and mental health connected with
income and wealth, and with life satisfaction, wellbeing is “related to our sense
of social connectedness, inclusion and participation, existential security and
safety, political citizenship, self-development and actualization, and
opportunities for education, recreation and creative expression.”
The Remaking Society
project is made up an interdisciplinary team of researchers, partnering with
experienced community arts organisations, working in four contrasting contexts
of deprivation, alongside the arts and health programme of NHS Greater Glasgow
and Clyde, Cadispa Trust, and www.poverty.ac.uk.
It aims to:
- Demonstrate how
participation in cultural production in locations where people are experiencing
increasing economic hardship can catalyse the creation of community and
wellbeing.
- Explore the ways in which, through creative engagement with arts and media processes, participants can re-vision collective futures
- Compare the different
working principles and theories of community arts practice in the demonstration
site organisations
- Test methodologies for
evaluating cultural practice as an integral component of socioeconomic
regeneration.
- Provide a set of narrative
insights, through cultural production, into the lived experience of poverty and
social exclusion; broadening the range of evidence contributing to the UK
national Poverty and Social Exclusion (PSE) Study (www.poverty.ac.uk).
This conference will explore those aspects of the project
which complexify current understandings of the ‘social impacts’ of the arts:
- providing a grounded analysis of
histories of practice and specific
creative processes
- exploring different ways of activating arts
and cultural practices as community assets (i.e. arts not simply ‘brought in’
from outside to impact communities
- showing arts working within
multi-agency arrangements;
- exploring conflicts over the rationales
for arts project design and evaluation by different organisations (government,
NGO, corporate, commissioning, funding, etc.
- questioning key concepts of
power, participation, representation and agency in participatory arts and media practices
Although cultural policy debates are entrenched, the
situation on the ground is dynamic, and tends to be driven by urgent pragmatism
rather than ideological purism. Moving beyond a reliance on arguments about
‘instrumental’ versus ‘intrinsic’ benefits of arts participation, the project
explores the role of creative participation in acting as a catalyst for social
change, exploring the proposition that
“there is a fundamental connection to be explored between creativity and
health as a pathologically optimistic expression of survival.”
Whilst concepts of ‘community’ and ‘participation’ with arts and media practice
remain contingent, contested and partial, under some circumstances they may
also retain the potential to articulate alternative values and visions to the
dominant socio-economic order.
Connected Communities is a RCUK cross-Council programme
designed to help us understand the changing nature of communities in their
historical and cultural contexts and the role of communities in sustaining and
enhancing our quality of life. The programme seeks not only to connect research
on communities, but to connect communities with research, bringing together
community-engaged research across a number of core themes, including community
health and wellbeing, community creativity, prosperity and regeneration,
community values and participation, sustainable community environments, places
and spaces, and community cultures, diversity, cohesion, exclusion, and
conflict.
What
will participants in the conference gain?
- learning from examples of interesting work
elsewhere
- heightened awareness of the key issues
and challenges facing the field of participatory arts
- access to resources/expertise/networks
- broadening perspectives on the histories, values and politics of participatory arts and media practices
- some ways to think beyond entrenched
positions, views, and criticisms of participatory/community arts practices
Programme Outline
Sharing findings - with examples from each of the projects:
· Theatre Modo working in Fraserburgh: the Maelstrom Project
· Odd Numbers project (NADFLY/Baxendale/Love Milton) in Milton, North Glasgow
· Bradford Community Broadcasting, Bradford
· Swingbridge Media, North Tyneside
Keynote Speakers
Rahila Gupta, Southall Black Sisters: Imagining 'Communities'
François Matarasso: Community arts: histories, values, futures
Workshops:
Learning/training/mentoring/skills exchange for the field (Creative Scotland/Paul Hamlyn Foundation 'Artworks' project/Mary Dowson/Graham Jeffery)
2 The value of this work to individuals and communities (Tom Wakeford/BCB)
Cultural participation and relationship to health and wellbeing (Kerrie Schaefer/Theatre Modo/NHSGGC)
Myth, magic and regeneration (Neill Patton and Nicola Atkinson)
Relationships to policy (Graham Jeffery)
Creation of alternatives (Tom Wakeford/Kerrie Schaefer)
Who should attend?
Researchers,
practitioners, policymakers, commissioners, evaluators, activists, curators,
artists, citizens – people with an interest in the roles of the arts and media
in community development and regeneration.
We welcome proposals for additional
workshops, relevant to the conference theme, of 1 hour 15 minutes.
Please email graham.jeffery@uws.ac.uk with
details of your proposal, no later than Friday 15th February.
Registration details
An
online system for registering for the conference will shortly be available. In
the meantime please email Gillian.Dyer@uws.ac.uk to
reserve a place. The cost of the day, which includes lunch/refreshments, is £50
(£40 for voluntary sector/students/unwaged participants).
The
Remaking Society research team is made up of
Nicola Atkinson NADFLY/Love
Milton
Martin Danziger Theatre
Modo
Mary Dowson Bradford
Community Broadcasting
Lee Ivett Baxendale/Love
Milton
Graham
Jeffery Reader in Music and
Performance, University of the West of Scotland
Hugh Kelly Swingbridge
Media, North Tyneside
Neill Patton Fieldworker
and Researcher, The Cadispa Trust
Kerrie Schaefer Senior
Lecturer in Drama, University of Exeter
Tom
Wakeford Senior Research Fellow,
School of Health in Social Science University of Edinburgh
Mulligan, Humphery,
James, Scanlon, Smith and Welch (2006: 22): Creating
Community. Celebrations, Arts and Wellbeing Within and Across Local
Communities, The Globalism Institute; Vic Health.
