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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In this episode she talks with Owen Kelly about an as-yet unpublished paper she has written exploring the nature of nature writing, its effects on nature and its effects on culture.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.