MIAAW

This, the final episode of Ways of Listening, was recorded live by Hannah Kemp-Welch at the symposium ‘Listening Together: Practices for Community-Centred Listening' at London College of Communication in February 2025. Drawing on their experiences and emerging practices, electroacoustic composer Julia Schauerman, queer artist and educator Samantha Dick, and Senior Lecturer at University of Arts London Lainy Malkani reflect on the creative and ethical issues of working with the recorded voices of others. Together, they consider what a reflective and responsible creative practice looks like. The discussion touches upon - consent and permission, artistic interpretation of recorded voices, representation and agency of the voice subjects, and practical challenges.

With this podcast we begin a new set of summer reading suggestions for 2025. In the first episode of the summer (if indeed it is summer where you are) Owen Kelly and David Morley discuss Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century written by Christian Caryl and published in 2014.Neither of them agree with Caryl's political position but instead argue about the usefulness of the approach he takes to history. Rather than following an issue he traces five plot-threads across the year 1979 and argues that they intertwine in significant ways that narrative-based conventional history overlooks.This, we might feel, is perhaps more prescient than it appeared when the book was first published. Donald Trump's first 100 days in office have been chaotic but might better be seen as the culmination of a series of separate but related plot threads that originated in Bejing, Jerusalem, Moscow, New Delhi, Riyadh and Tehran, rather than in Washington. Understanding Caryl's hypothesis might make making sense of the state of the world today somewhat easier.David Morley is emeritus professor at the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths in the University of London.

Sovay Berriman describes her work as “rooted in their experience of being Cornish, their culture's shifting identity, and the mutability yet power of a sense of place”. She “uses her practice as a structure and prompt for action and discussion, and is committed to questioning balances of power”.In 2015 Sovay trained as a plumbing and heating engineer and works in the construction industry alongside their art activity with a commitment to helping customers transition to low carbon heating. Their experiences in this line of work have developed the critical socio-economic and political aspects of their practice, particularly in relation to environment, care and the labour of making.In this conversation she talks to Owen Kelly about her relationship to kernowek, the indigenous Cornish language, its conservation and nurturing, her recent provocation on Rewilding Arts Management, and the ways in which art, activism, and plumbing can work together.

On episode 51 of “A Culture of Possibility,” Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with David Cutler, Director of The Baring Foundation, based in London. One of Baring's strategic grant areas is Arts & Mental Health, granting about £1 million per year over at least five years to organizations specializing in arts and creativity with people with mental health problems; supporting participatory artists from Global Majority communities in this work; and supporting more men to engage in creative mental health. They've published considerable material documenting this work. We'll talk with David about how and why the Foundation chose this focus, the impact they're having, and how their work fits into the larger arts funding landscape.

This episode was recorded live at a symposium titled ‘Listening Together: Practices for Community-Centred Listening'. The symposium was hosted by the research centre Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice at London College of Communication in February 2025. Our regular host Hannah Kemp-Welch chaired a panel with two artists: Beverley Bennett, who organises ‘gatherings' to challenge the hierarchies inherent in workshop settings, and Sam Metz, who's work with non-verbal participants invites listening ‘through the body'. The panel considers the question: what can we learn about listening from socially engaged artists?

Youth Landscapers Collective (YLC) operate as a youth arts organisation based in the National Forest area of England. They describe themselves as “a collective of young people, artists and technicians who collaborate with our local community to explore this landscape's industrial past and forest future.” In the final episode of the current series of YLC Special Editions, Sophie Hope interviews Youth Landscapers' Producer Rebecca Lee along with members Alfie Ropson and Georgia Harris-Marsh, and board member Jo Wheeler. YLC reflect on their experiences of last year's song-making project, get into the nitty gritty around the youth-led structure of the organisation and discuss future plans.

Owen Griffiths describes himself as “an artist, workshop leader and facilitator. Using participatory and collaborative processes, his socially engaged practice explores the possibilities of art to create new frameworks, resources and systems.” From 2017-2019 he acted as co-director of Gentle/Radical, a community arts and social justice project based in Cardiff. He also leads several long-term projects.Lucy Elmes works as a Contemporary Art Curator and Producer based in Plymouth. She leads the Curatorial Programme at Take A Part, strengthening the socially engaged art sector by connecting communities with artists to co-create impactful projects. Kim Wide MBE founded, and acts as CEO and Artistic Director of, Take A Part in 2008. Hailing from Canada, Kim started her work in museums and collections at the City of Toronto and Government of Ontario Art Collection before moving to the UK in 2003.In this concluding episode of the Social Making special editions Owen, Lucy and Kim discuss with Sophie Hope and Hannah Kemp-Welch. They talk about the ways in which socially engaged art becomes part of larger social, politcal, educational and cultural streams, and how the role of the artist needs regular renegotiation. They look at their current practices, identify stress points and look forward to their possible futures.

In episode 50 of “A Culture of Possibility,” Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk about a remarkable book, Engineers of the Imagination: The Welfare State Handbook. First published in 1983, it's both an account of a novel and exciting approach to community performance and a how-to manual for anyone who wants to use or adapt its tools and methods. The book conveys the spirit and generosity of the British community arts movement during those years, and gives François and Arlene a good excuse to reminisce about the impact of this innovative and influential work in Europe and the U.S.s for the future. You are invited to respond with comments and suggestions. What do you need from the podcast?

Hector MacInnes works in socially engaged art, sound and research. His practice includes spoken word, sonic fiction, installation, text, tech, music, radio, speculative design and organising things, often in collaboration with other artists and a diverse range of communities. Hector was born and grew up on the Isle of Skye, and his projects are deeply rooted in an ongoing interrogation of belonging, identity, legitimacy and lived experience of the more-than-urban, themes he's brought to his practice-based doctoral research into the concept of the field, anthropocene rurality, and the ‘New Weird'. In this episode, Hannah Kemp-Welch talks in depth about a project Hector has been working on in a prison (HMP Inverness), and the particular sonic environment in which this work is situated.

Youth Landscapers Collective is a youth arts organisation based in the National Forest area of England. We're a collective of young people, artists and technicians who collaborate with our local community to explore this landscape's industrial past and forest future.In this episode we want to give you a sense of how we work together. YLC member Kris Kirkwood has built a sound narrative of our 2024 song-making project, using audio recordings from our sessions - from the seeds of our ideas through to performance. Here's a bit of context about the project, to help set the scene:In 2023, YLC created The Stage of Possibility – a vibrant, democratic space designed, built and curated by YLC to showcase stories and voices from the National Forest at Timber Festival. The project connected us back to the creative and resourceful communities that grew from the former coalpits and pipe works of this area. In 2024 we wanted to strengthen that connection and also perform together on the stage too! We created a set of locally inspired songs, in a project we called: WAYANNAEYINANYONNIT (A Big Story).Working with artists Rebecca Lee and Jesscia Harby and our community we sought out the hidden stories of our local area, finding them in discussions with former mining engineer, pipe worker, and co-founder of Moira Replan Graham Knight, research visits to Moira Furnace Museum and The Magic Attic Community Archive, and sharing our own personal experiences. From Graham we learned stories of injustices small and large in the mine - the disappearance of cakes sent down for overtime workers and the tragic death of a young co-worker in an accident. From Clyde at Magic Attic we learnt local dialect and the definition and pronunciation of our title: WAYANNAEYINANYONNIT. More than anything we responded with heart to what it must have felt like to take part in each of these stories and what it's like to be living here today, many of our houses built over the unfilled mining tunnels.The songs we made and performed share our experience of the National Forest, as the past, present and future overlap, canaries sing, children climb on the lime kilns, new words are shouted, and we make sure we're all alright.

This episode addresses two questions. How can we ensure more access and equality in the development of public spaces? How can we make certain that the voices of young people become embedded in planning processes?Sophie Hope and Hannah Kemp-Welch discuss with Ben Bordwick and Leo Valls who both made presentations at Social Making in October 2024.Note:Social Making iteration 5 took place on October 10 and 11, 2024, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

On Episode 49 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso returns from medical leave to join Arlene Goldbard in considering the podcast as its fifth year begins. They explore the intentions that have guided them so far, and talk about key questions for the future. You are invited to respond with comments and suggestions. What do you need from the podcast?

Joanne Coates practises as a socially engaged artist, using photography to ask questions about rurality and wealth inequality.Her work explores gender, class and disability, drawing on her lived experience. Projects often involve participation and varying levels of collaboration with communities. In this episode, we speak about Jo's recent work with young women in the Yorkshire Dales and Orkney, Scotland.Alongside and intersecting with her practice, Jo works as a part-time farm labourer and runs a project called Roova, bringing together artists and communities to forge connections in rural landscapes.

Youth Landscapers Collective (YLC) is a youth arts organisation based in the National Forest area of England. We're a collective of young people, artists and technicians who collaborate with our local community to explore this landscape's industrial past and forest future. Together we make ambitious, creative projects to share at a variety of festivals, events, and online. In the past nine years we've worked with over 50 groups and individuals, including a beekeeper, ex-miners, scouts, Derbyshire's official fungi recorder, potters, photographers, a mushroom grower, narrowboat restorers, museum curators, community archivists, forestry workers, amateur radio enthusiasts, musicians, kiln workers, historians, wildlife recorders, filmmakers, charcoal makers, bird watchers and folk singers. Over that time our youth members have grown in confidence and skills, developing experience and commitment to shape and direct where Youth Landscapers Collective goes next. In this episode we introduce you to who we are and what we do via an online conversation between artist Jo Wheeler, who helped initiate YLC in 2016, and three of our Youth Council members, Alfie Ropson, Isaac Munslow and Kris Kirkwood. Alfie, Isaac and Kris have all been involved with YLC since the early days and now contribute as paid project assistants, artists, technicians and board members.

Most months have four Fridays, and we know what to do with them. We put out a podcast: a different but related one for each Friday in the month. Sometimes, however, a month has five Fridays, and then we do something different - usually celebrating sound in one way or another. This month we have the first Friday Number Five of 2025 and we start another irregular series of Radio Miaaw: podcasts of music issued under Creative Commons licences which we last did four years ago. We will pick a theme for each edition. In this episode we showcase a range of music available on Tribe of Noise, based in Amsterdam and one of the longest running independent platforms for Creative Commons licensed musics. You can find full episode notes with links to all the music at miaaw.net.

This episode addresses the question: how can we reclaim land from white colonial power structures? In it Hannah Kemp-Welch & Sophie Hope talk with Nadia Shaikh and Mark Teh, who both made presentations at Social Making 5. Nadia Shaikh “joined Right to Roam in 2021 after 14 years in the nature conservation sector, convinced that mainstream 'nature protection' wasn't involving people in a meaningful way and that the connections between enclosure, land ownership and our devastating biodiversity loss were too big to ignore. She now lives in Scotland where she enjoys roaming free, rock pooling and kayaking. She covers the campaign's operations, events, and work on social justice.” Mark Teh “is a performance maker, researcher, and curator based in Malaysia. His practice is situated primarily in performance, but also operates via exhibitions, education, social interventions, writing, and curating. He is a member of Five Arts Centre, and graduated with an MA in Art and Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London”. In this episode Hannah, Mark, Nadia and Sophie discuss the different ways in which Right To Roam in England and the artists associated with Five Arts Centre in Kuala Lumpar approach the theory and practice of reclaiming land for democratic use. Note: Social Making iteration 5 took place on October 10 and 11, 2024, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

This month, Owen Kelly joins Arlene Goldbard to discuss a report entitled “State of Culture” from Culture Action Europe, which describes itself as "the major European network of cultural networks, organisations, artists, activists, academics and policymakers. As the only intersectoral network it brings together members and strategic partners from all areas of culture. Culture Action Europe is the political voice of the cultural sector in Europe...." The group was new to both of us, but since CAE says of itself that "we take care of the cultural ecosystem," cultural democracy is one of the tags on its website, and a few posts mentioning François Matarasso appear, we decided to study the 163-page report so you don't have to! Tune in to find out what the political voice of the European cultural sector is thinking and saying these days.

Angharad Davies is an artist and architectural researcher, and a member of public works. Her research examines the communities that exist around local, publicly accessible spaces. She believes in architecture as biography, and writing as an architectural process. In this episode, we hear about her long term work with communities at Rurban in Poplar, London, and the activities and approaches they use to build relationships with local residents.

In London, on March 29, 2010, The Daily Telegraph published an obituary that began like this. “Colin Ward, who has died aged 85, was Britain's leading anarchist, a pioneer of adventure playgrounds and a champion of allotment holders and tenant co-operatives; he was the former editor of Anarchy magazine and an unlikely holder of the post of education officer of the Town and Country Planning Association”. His life covered a lot of different territory from architecture to education. He lived “an anarchism rooted in everyday experience, and not necessarily linked to industrial and political struggles. His ideas were heavily influenced by Peter Kropotkin and his concept of mutual aid”. In his 1973 book Anarchy in Action he wrote “The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism”. Ken Worpole knew Colin Ward well for many years, and has contributed a chapter to a new book, Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchism, celebrating his life, thought, and work. In this episode he talks with Owen Kelly about some aspects of these.

François Matarasso is taking a break for medical treatment. We hope he will rejoin us very soon. On episode 47 of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard interviews Clementine Sandison, an artist who works with people in Scotland to build solidarity networks, improve livelihoods and access to training for landworkers, and campaigns on land justice. Clementine works as co-Director of Alexandra Park Food Forest, a community greenspace in the East end of Glasgow where volunteers produce food, cook and share meals, organize community celebrations, and explore notions of commoning and how to steward public land.

This episode addresses the question: should embedding creative enterprise models be a fundamental approach to sustaining the future of Socially Engaged Art? Hannah Kemp-Welch & Sophie Hope talk with Kathrin Böhm from Company Drinks, a community space and cultural enterprise based in Barking and Dagenham; and Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell from Bank Job and Power Station, based in the London Borough of Walthamstow. All three of them participated in Social Making iteration 5. Company Drinks works as a long term project in which each step of the production, distribution, and planning operates as a public space. They have produced drinks from handpicked ingredients for ten years now, and use social enterprise models as part of their arts practice. Power Station grew out of a previous project called Bank Job that took over a high street bank and attempted to create an equitable local economy. Power Station works towards making a street in Waltham Forest into a collective power station, with long term plans to create a borough wide, communally owned solar power company. Note: Social Making iteration 5 took place on October 10 and 11, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

The Museum of Unrest acts as a not-for-profit educational project to support artists designers and communities engaged in art and design linked to social and environmental justice. The project is an online continuation of an organisation that has supported art and social engagement since 1975 when it opened in west London as Paddington Printshop and subsequently became londonprintstudio. Faced with Covid and rising costs the londonprintstudio facilities closed in 2020 but gave birth to the Museum of Unrest. The first collection went online in January 2024 and included commissioned articles, interviews and links on the topic of artists' and activists' museums. The second collection went online last month. Curated by Clive Russell it asks the question: what might we mean by “good design”? In this episode Owen Kelly talks to John Phillips and Clive Russell about their work, the museum, and where it might all lead.

Some months have five Fridays, and when this happens add an extra podcast to our normal schedule. In 2021 we played music licensed under creative commons licences; in 2022 we excavated four old radio shows; and in 2023 we looked back at four early classics from Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse. This year we have found another podcast that we think might interest you: one published under a Creative Commons licence that somehow connects to things here at Miaaw. This month we go to the heart of enshittification, and listen to episode 438 of Cory Doctorow's own podcast. He takes Tiktok as an example and lays out his theory of enshittification, using that as an example. His podcast varies between reading extracts from his novels, reading extracts from his books, and pulling together his thoughts on current cultural and political issues. Many other episodes will prove worth your time, and he has them all stored at archive.org.

As part of the fifth edition of Social Making: “the UK's only biennial symposium dedicated to socially engaged art practice, co-creation, and place-making” Kim Wide and Anurupa Roy led a workshop exploring the implications of jugaad. Kim Wide works as the founder and director of Take A Part. Anurupa Roy works as an award-winning puppet designer and director of puppet-based theatre. The BBC has described jugaad as “an untranslatable word for winging it”. The word exists in Hindu, Urdu and Punjabi and describes using whatever you have to hand to make something you need; a process of frugal improvisation. In this episode Sophie Hope and Hannah Kemp-Welch talk to them about the workshop; about the nature of jugaad, as a global practice of subversion by radical practice,; the collective politics that fuel jugaad; and what it might actually mean in an English, or European, context. Note: Social Making iteration 5 took place at Brix on October 10 and 11, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

In episode 46 of A Culture of Possibility, while François Matarasso is taking a break for medical treatment, Arlene Goldbard interviews Libby Lenkinski, Founder and President of Albi.org, “a new fund, institute and lab that uses cultural vehicles to establish paradigm-shifting narratives by and about Palestinians and Jews”. Albi does many things. It supports film and TV projects. It aims to influence the creative industries, expanding the space for critical voices in cultural production to thrive and be true vehicles for change. It also supports a cohort of flagship artists working in diverse fields.

Nisha Duggal is an artist working across various mediums, exploring expressions of freedom in the everyday. She is interested in the transformative qualities of making and doing, engineering situations that uncover deep-seated primitive impulses to connect. In this episode, she tells us about Held, a multi-platform project in which she guided people to make pairs of simple, clay sculptures formed from the space within the palms of their hands. The crafting enabled her to connect and share conversations about place, land and belonging with participants.

Owen Kelly looks at three things that seem to have occurred over the last few months: 1. The failure of cultural democrats in Britain to present a manifesto, policy proposals, or cultural programme to the incoming Labour government; 2. Our collective failure to write our own narrative, and thus our reliance on perpetually opposing the dominant narrative; 3. Our continuing acceptance of just-in-time “arguing-against”, rather than developing long term strategies based on “arguing-for”. Owen proposes we look at how the IEA moved privatisation from the shadows to the mainstream and work out how we can play the long game ourselves. He illustrates some of the possibilities with two examples: the ICAF festival and The Museum of Unrest. He finishes by going wildly off-piste with a brief discussion of the secular benefits of henotheism in an apparent digression that turns out to play a central role in his argument.

Take A Part organises Social Making: “the UK's only biennial symposium dedicated to socially engaged art practice, co-creation, and place-making”. For the fifth edition of the symposium Take A Part moved from their base in Plymouth to host the event in Bristol. It took place at Brix on October 10 and 11, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Sophie Hope and Hannah Kemp-Welch recorded a conversation during a convenient coffee break on the first day of the programme with participants who included Maureen Arhin, Claudia Collins, Damien McGlynn, Tamar Millen, and Claire Tymon. This episode looks at what brought them all to Social Making, and what lessons they drew from the first set of workshops. They offer a range of views drawn from their reactions and responses. They discuss the terms used in the presentations and how the vocabulary used can serve to frame a debate.

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 identity and diversity, which read differently in France where François is based than in the U.S. where Arlene lives. Does it go without saying that each word means something different to each of the co-hosts? Every one can be used in an ideal sense which doesn't provoke much disagreement, but it's where the words describe practices that are far from ideal that complexity sets in.

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 worked in the cultural sector for over 40 years in various capacities, including as a gallery director, academic, think tank researcher and a consultant. Much of her work in that sector focuses on cultural policy and the relationship between its expectations, funding, delivery, implementation and impact. Her clients have ranged from government agencies and national museums to small, regional organisations. She edited the international, academic journal, Cultural Trends from its inception in 1994 until 2019. Having decided to start again she completed a BSc, majoring in natural sciences and the environment, and now works as a volunteer researcher for the government agency, Natural England. In this episode she talks with Owen Kelly about an as-yet unpublished paper she has written exploring the nature of nature writing, its effects on nature and its effects on culture.

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 initiative, their different lines of enquiry threading through it, and approach the question of what a socially engaged, de-centred conservatoire might be and do. The De-Centre operates under the stewardship of Guildhall School staff members who convene monthly to deliberate and make decisions collaboratively. So while this episode features Sophie, Sean and Jo telling their story, there are many more people involved who have inspired this work and who are currently making things happen. Please see the website to find out more, and join the mailing list to get updates.

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 participants and spectators in public spaces, developing new ways of connecting with the arts and encouraging them to come along, learn new skills and make a creative contribution to the community”. Arlene and François talk to William about his work in community street performance such as parades and street theatre; about building strong long-term relationships around community identity and collective pride; and about engaging people both as participants and spectators in public spaces through community art projects.

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 seekers in community settings. Natalie Smith joined Arc Theatre in 1992. She has performed in and facilitated over 50 of the Company's productions and programmes and is now their Education Director. In this episode, we talk about the role of listening in this work, particularly in projects with young people.

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, advocacy and skills to take action on change in their own communities through culture. Our home is Plymouth, where we develop and test our models of best practice, but we work across the UK and internationally to support a larger community voice in our cultural sector. We have worked with large scale cultural institutions, universities, scientists, local authorities, trust and foundations and think tanks to centre communities in practice.” Take A Part organises Social Making: “the UK's only biennial symposium dedicated to socially engaged art practice, co-creation, and place-making”. In this episode Hannah Kemp-Wech and Sophie Hope talk to Kim Wide, the CEO and artistic director of Take A Part, about the symposium which will take place in Bristol on October 10 and 11. This episode acts as an introduction to a multi-part series that Miaaw.net and Take A Part will begin broadcasting on Friday October 25, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

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 ourselves in the fifth Friday of a month we will look around us and find a podcast that interests us: one published under a Creative Commons licence that relates in one way or another to our areas of interest. This month we return to the Bees of Bensham, a project we looked at in June in episode 036 of Common Practice. They now have a podcast available. Created by Mattie, a writer and perfomer from Northumberland, the series of podcasts involves interviews with some of the artists, ecologists, naturalists, bee experts and enthusiasts and residents involved in the project. We asked Ben Jones, founder of Dingy Butterflies, to pick an episode for us to rebroadcast, and this is the one that he chose: an episode in which Mattie interviews Barbara Keating, the lead artist on the project.

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 and rough ceramics. In this episode Sophie Hope and Barry Sykes sit in Barry's studio in Walthamstow and discuss his current art project exploring permissable spaces for respite, refusal and reclining through drawing, making, waiting, witnessing and sweating.

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 Colours/Couleurs primaires, a multi-year arts initiative whose main objective is to place Indigenous arts at the centre of the Canadian arts system through gatherings, public presentations, incubation projects, residencies, research and more aimed at generating new knowledge.

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 taught art and art history at the Chicago Public School Northside College Prep. Jorge Lucero has performed, published, lectured, exhibited, and taught widely in the United States and abroad. In 2023, Lucero was named the National Art Education Association's (NAEA) Higher Ed Educator of the Year. ‘Conceptual Art and Teaching' is a project initiated by Jorge Lucero who joins Hannah Kemp-Welch for the tenth episode of Ways of Listening to consider listening within critical pedagogy and as a daily practice. He draws attention to both the humility and the ‘slowness' needed for listening.

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 artists that could enable many more to pursue livelihoods through art practices over a life cycle. She now works as an independent arts researcher and writer who holds specialist knowledge and insight about the social and political environment for artists and contemporary visual arts. She has published an essay in the latest issue of Art Monthly looking at the possibility of a new deal for cultural practitioners. In the light of the new UK Labour government, and the opportunities that may or may not bring, Owen Kelly talks to Susan Jones about possible futures. After the recording Susan pointed out that Owen had referred several times to something called “arts monthly”, when he meant Art Monthly; and that he had mispronounced Nicholas Serota's name. He should have said Nick Ser-OH-ta.

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 session on cultural democracy. The conference addressed the topic: Cultural Production and the Redundancy of Work: precarity, automation and critique. The Movement for Cultural Democracy organised a panel at the conference and Sophie Hope, Nick Mahony and Stephen Pritchard spoke at it. In this episode Sophie Hope describes some of the context to Owen Kelly, and we listen to live recordings of Nick and Stephen's presentations. Nick Mahony's presentation, “Realising Cultural Democracy”, provides a historical background for the growth of the Movement for Cultural Democracy. He draws a link between the writing of Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution and the birth of this current manifestation of a movement for cultural democracy that began at The World Transformed in Liverpool, in September 2017. Stephen Pritchard reflects on his childhood in Jarrow in a performance style lecture that uses video and archival sound recordings as part of the presentation. The presentation, “Home Is Where We Start From”, has a poetic air that weaves in critiques of the way working class culture has been deliberately co-opted or dismantled; and the ways in which gentrification and art-washing continue to attempt to do this.

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 communication, effectiveness, and collaboration depend on exploring meanings for both differences and points of connection. What words would like you like explored? In this discussion Arlene and François draw from the work originated by Raymond Williams n his 1976 book Keywords, which has had many subsequent editions. They also reference New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, and published in 2005; one of several inspired by Williams' book.

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 overlapping interests in collective organising with artistic practices, and how this led to a formative project, intervening in the structure of the seminar to disrupt the usual power dynamics. Alex questions - how do we respond to non-participation? Could there be richness in refusal? Together with Hannah, Alex discusses the tensions between the requirement or desire to plan a workshop, and creating space to really listen and respond to the room.

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 measurement and analysis of physics and chemistry. This has been the prevailing view of scientists and intellectuals in the modern age, beginning with Descartes, and remains so today. In this book, as relevant today as it was in 1977, Schumacher demonstrates the inadequacy of this philosophy, while pointing to the ancient tradition–confirmed by modern writers and mystics–that matter, life, consciousness, and self-awareness represent progressively higher Levels of Being, and that recognition of this hierarchy is essential to a true understanding of the world”. Owen Kelly takes a sceptical look at A Guide for the Perplexed, the book that E. F. Schumaker considered his most important work. He argues that we should read it, but read it sceptically.

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 cultural democracy, humans learning to keep habitats scruffy and drawing attention to existing biodiversity perhaps is.

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 the role that art plays in changing our social and economic systems. Natalia spent more than a decade working in the music industry before joining the New Economy Coalition, a network of over 150 groups focused on building the solidarity economy movement in the U.S. and internationally. In 2021, she co-authored the report Solidarity Not Charity: Arts & Culture Grantmaking in the Solidarity Economy, which traced the long history of artists organizing for economic justice and pushed funders to invest in solutions to the root causes of systemic failures that leave artists vulnerable. Art.coop supports artistic communities to provide for themselves and increase collective ownership of housing and creative businesses, as well as build solidarity in the field by speaking more openly about the harsh realities of making a living in their industries while tapping into legacies of artist resistance. In Culture of Possibility #41, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso interview Nati Linares, whose focus is the solidarity economy for artists, with its resist/fight and build model: calling attention to what's wrong, experimenting with alternatives. We talk about Nati's grounding in the music business, leading to an understanding of capitalism and how it works or doesn't for artists, and the research she and her colleagues have done on alternative models for financing artists' work.

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 Unheard. Neolithic Cannibals recreated the Neolithic Camp - a place of communion, celebration, and ritual - as a compassionate listening space inviting audiences to discover Whitehawk's richness, joy, playfulness, and hope, empowering local voices through rarely explored sonic expressions. Simon discusses the process of the project, and how listening played a central part throughout it.

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 that grantmakers have our interests at heart? Can we assume that we have a working relationship with funders, or should we see ourselves in a struggle against what they stand for? Whatever happened to the strategies of self-funding that people at many different times and in many parts of the world used to build autonomous oppositional structures? Has this possibility disappeared in the rush to consumption? The book provides a valuable resource in at least three ways. It presents a coherent argument. It presents a lot of interesting case studies and examples. It serves to trigger wider discussions.

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 into the fifth Friday of a month we will look around us and find a podcast that interests us: one published under a Creative Commons licence that relates in one way or another to our areas of interest. This show brings you Episode 69 of a podcast called Free as in Freedom, and was released on Tuesday 12 November 2019. It was produced by The Software Freedom Conservancy. Karen M. Sandler and Bradley M Kuhn discuss the end to Microsoft's e-book platform and move on to talk more generally about the dangers and disasters that Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) causes for software users and developers

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 London, England.

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 as “a global organisation that uses artistic creativity in places impacted by conflict and climate change as a tool for positive change. We enable grassroots change-makers in music, theatre and across the arts to transform cultures of violence and suffering into hope, opportunity and freedom.” Arlene Goldbard, François and James talk about his journey and his work and what we might learn about shifting perspective from eulogy to criticism, to solidarity, to love, consciously valuing what is good.