Presentation for MECCSA 2013 about Remaking Society, an AHRC-funding Connected Communities Pilot Demonstrator project

1. Remaking Society: realising the potential of cultural
activities in contexts of deprivation
An AHRC Connected Communities ‘pilot
demonstrator’ project
Graham Jeffery
University of the West of Scotland
Neill Patton
The Cadispa Trust
www.twitter.com/RemakingSociety

2. 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

3. 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).

4. explorations
• complexify current understandings of the social impacts of
the arts:
• providing a grounded analysis of histories of practice and
specific 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.).

5. diverse perspectives on participatory
arts
• Everyday participation vs ‘high culture’
• Outreach, engagement, conversation, encount
er
• 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

6. 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

7. Theatre Modo

19. Love Milton

35. 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

36. 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)