Remaking Society: realising the potential of cultural activities in contexts of deprivation

An AHRC Connected Communities ‘pilot demonstrator’ project

Graham JefferyUniversity of the West of Scotland

Neill PattonThe Cadispa Trust

www.twitter.com/RemakingSociety

Process

• Co-designed research process with experienced community-based partners

• Four sites: Fraserburgh, Milton (N.Glasgow), N Tyneside & Bradford

• Each working in areas of high deprivation using participatory arts/media methods, but each v different (periurban/urban/suburban context; different media, different approaches/philosophies)

• Participatory arts/media not one thing but complex, variegated fields of practice

Aims

• 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).

explorations

• complexify current understandings of the social impacts of the arts:

• providing a grounded analysis of histories of practice andspecific creative processes

• exploring arts and cultural practices as community assets to be activated (i.e. arts not simply ‘brought in’ from outside to impact communities); cultural activity as ‘bringing community into existence’

• showing arts working within multi-agency arrangements; • uncovering conflicts over the rationales for arts evaluation

by different organisations (government NGO, corporate, commissioning, funding, etc.).

diverse perspectives on participatory arts

• Everyday participation vs ‘high culture’

• Outreach, engagement, conversation, encounter

• Most theoretically developed in models of ‘community cultural development’ in UK, Australia and the US (Kretzman/McKnight/Hawkes/Goldbard)

• Contested concepts and complex terrain

• The ‘value of culture’ debate

antecedents & arrangements

• Theatre Modo: European street theatre/circus traditions; celebratory arts companies such as Welfare State International: commissioned process within local authority/third sector partnership – focus on ‘engaging the disengaged’/‘circus with a purpose’

• www.theatremodo.com

• Love Milton: Odd Numbers - dialogical art strand led by artist Nicola Atkinson and architect Lee Ivett within multi-dimensional grassroots community regeneration project (gardening, new build community centre, social/cultural activities); ‘new genre public art/socially engaged art’?

• www.lovemilton.org

Theatre Modo

Love Milton

Issues• A more nuanced analysis of modes of cultural participation• Engagement at a range of different levels of intensity – policy pressures for

‘outcomes/impact’ but engagement is fuzzier and less linear than a simple input/output model

• Not a full ‘typology’ of cultural participation/community arts but a set of cases that yield different insights

• The tension between ‘artist led’ and ‘community led’ processes and the role of ‘facilitation’

• Locating the projects within theoretical/critical/philosophical frameworks• “Theatre Modo” & “Love Milton” use ‘brand awareness’ to promote/reshape

perceptions• Culture as a component of social wellbeing? • Temporary autonomous spaces? Models of modelling and mentoring?• Reshaping perceptions of place through shared, public, cultural practices

Tentative optimism?

• 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, our study will provide rich narrative insights into the hypothesis that: “making art is a biological necessity…there is a fundamental connection to be explored between creativity and health as a pathologically optimistic expression of survival.” (White 2009 p. 6)