We have arrived at the final podcast of 2023, which also happens to fall on the fifth Friday of the fourth month of 2023 with five Fridays in it. We therefore take a final look into the Miaaw past and listen once more to another memorable episode from our short history. This time we listen in to Owen and Sophie dig out their copies of Marxism & Literature and discuss the cultural theory that Raymond Williams develops there in considerable detail. They reflect on Williams’ insistence on...

Based in Bucharest, Raluca Voinea works as a curator and art critic, based in Bucharest and, since 2012 as co-director of tranzit.ro Association. In 2013 she acted as the curator of the Romanian Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale and in 2015 she co-authored, with Alexandra Pirici, The Manifesto for the Gynecene: Sketch of a New Geological Era. The Manifesto subsequently became translated into several languages and included in different publications and exhibitions. In this episode she...

Judith Marcuse has become one of Canada’s senior artist/producers, with an international career that spans over 50 years as dancer, choreographer, director, producer, teacher, writer and lecturer. In 2007 she founded the International Centre of Art for Social Change, initially as a partnership with Simon Fraser University, where she was appointed an adjunct professor. Marcuse acted as the lead investigator of a six-year (2013- 19), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council-funded...

In his own words, Edwin Mingard works as “a socially-engaged visual artist. I work principally with moving image, making standalone artists' film and installations. My work often plays with mainstream and accessible forms – documentary, music video, magazine – so as to move beyond a traditional gallery audience. “I am interested in who makes moving image work, how, why, and for whom. I often produce work within a discrete community or interest group, making work with a personal connection to...

Su 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...

The word falay means running water, accumulated underground through rainfall over millennia. Considered by locals of Ru-us al-Jibal as sacred, it acts as a driving force in the creation of landscapes and social practices. In Helsinki, Zeynep Falay von Flittner has brought together a collective of transitions designers, systems thinkers, sustainability experts and researchers using system-aware creative practice to catalyse regenerative futures. In this conversation she discusses what drives...

On Culture of Possibility podcast #34, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Ralph Lister, executive director of Take Art in rural Somerset, England. Take Art has been offering rural touring, projects in dance, theatre, and other arts practices, and working with artists and community groups, including schools, hospitals, day centres, youth clubs and early childhood education for going on four decades. In this episode, they look at the ways perception, funding, and policy...

Albert Potrony’s website describes him as “an artist with a participatory practice examining ideas of identity, community and language. Potrony is interested in generating social spaces through his projects, and participation from diverse groups and individuals is a key element of his work.” In this conversation with Hannah Kemp-Welch he introduces his participatory arts practice, describing a recent project with young fathers in Gateshead and former members of an anti-sexist men’s group....

In this episode Owen Kelly continues a discussion begun last month. He begins by quoting a comment that ARlene Goldbard made after the last episode, and addressing the point she made. He goes on to look at the relationship between copyright and branding, and at two recent events in which large corporations have attempted to extend the use of trademarks in predatory ways. He looks at Starbucks’ attempts to silence their union and at easyGroup, “Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou’s private investment...

Sophie Hope talks to Sam Trotman, Director of Scottish Sculpture Workshop about the work SSW do in the rural community of Lumsden. They focus on how their Community Making Space came about, who uses it and how SSW work with a wide range of makers, near and far. They talk about working with wool, working with clay, and what’s for lunch.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #33, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard realize that, having talked a great deal about cultural democracy, they have yet to dive into the second half of that topic. Many people take democracy for granted, but what is it really: certainly more than majority rule and voting every once in a while. Where is it practiced? What’s standing in the way of democracy’s full realization and what can we do about it? How can culture advance democracy?

According to his website, John L. McKnight “was raised a traveling Ohioan, having lived in seven neighborhoods and small towns in the eighteen years before he left to attend Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois”. While working at the Chicago Commission for Human Relations, the first municipal civil rights agency, he learned the Alinsky trade called community organizing. He co-founded the Health & Medicine Policy Research Group with Dr. Quentin Young, co-founded The Gamaliel...

On September 14 Comic Book Resources reported that “Bill Willingham, the creator of the long-running Vertigo series, Fables, which was recently revived as part of DC's Black Label line of comics, has announced that he is putting the characters into the public domain as a result of years of disputes with DC over his contractual rights to the characters of the series, which is about a group of mythological beings who were exiled from their homelands to go live among humans. … Willingham...

We have come to the third month of 2023 with five Fridays in it, and so we look back at another memorable episode from our short history. This time we listen in to Owen and Sophie continue their discussion by focussing on the resurgence of interest in ideas of cultural democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, and the relationships between these and previous ideas. This episode stands as the third in a series. It follows on from Episode 4 which looked at a kind of pre-history of cultural democracy,...

This episode took several turns for the unexpected and veered wildly off piste in ways that turned out to make for a very interesting discussion. We begin with Chris Baldwin mysteriously missing in action, as Owen Kelly and Steve Trow discuss the ways in which the distribution of lottery funding has led to poorer areas effectively donating money for cultural provision in much richer areas. As Steve reaches his conclusions Chris Baldwin arrives from somewhere in Bulgaria and somehow brings...

On Culture of Possibility podcast #32, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Caron Atlas of Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts New York (NOCD-NY) and Arts & Democracy, two excellent groups that bridge culture, communities, and policy. Caron shares a wealth of stories of how creativity can be built into the fabric of communities, informing life on the ground as well as policymaking, including NOCD-NY’s recent forum to reimagine New York City. Learn about participatory...

We spoke with Ed Carroll and Vita Gelūnienė in April, as part of the series of ICAF specials, when we discussed The Cabbage Field, a community opera developed by Zemuju Sanciu Bendruomene in Kaunas in Lithuania. While attending ICAF we discovered that Ed knew a lot more than we did about the internal workings of the Faro Convention, and we asked him to explain it to us. In this episode Ed does just that. The Convention “is based on the idea that knowledge and use of heritage form part of the...

According to Wikipedia, “Cory Efram Doctorow (born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of its licences for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics”. He recently coined the neologism...

Concluding the special Miaaw at ICAF series, Owen Kelly talks with Will Weigler, a community-engaged theatre maker, writer and storyteller based in Vancouver Canada. In 2017, his book, The Alchemy of Astonishment, won the American Alliance for Theatre & Education's Distinguished Book Award for outstanding contribution to the field. The New York City Department of Education adopted The Alchemy of Astonishment, and distributed decks of the staging strategy cards and books to K-12 theatre...

On Culture of Possibility podcast #31, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Maribel Legarda, artistic director, and Beng Cabangon, executive director of the Philippines Educational Theater Association, PETA, founded in 1967! PETA is an amazing amalgam of in-person performance, streaming, workshops, and festivals, led by a large group of artist-teachers, many of whom began as teenagers. We talk about PETA’s creative strategies to navigate massive political changes, the pandemic,...

Born in Vienna in 1926, Ivan Illich acted as a Roman Catholic priest, a theologian, a philosopher, and a radical social critic. He died in December 2002. His 1971 book Deschooling Society criticises modern society's institutional approach to education, an approach that constrains learning to narrow situations in a fairly short period of the human lifespan. His 1975 book Medical Nemesis argues that industrialised society widely impairs quality of life by overmedicalising life, pathologizing...

Sophie Hope recorded this live report on the final day of the Rural School of Economics summer camp, organised by Kathrin Böhm and Wapke Feenstra of Myvillages, and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. The camp took place in July 2023 in Lumsden in Aberdeenshire, the home of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop. She talks with fellow participants about what they got up to during the summer camp and some of the questions that came up during their stay in rural Aberdeenshire. They explore reflections...

Continuing the special Miaaw at ICAF series, Owen Kelly talks with Kim Wide, the founder of Take A Part, based in Plymouth in the UK. He asks about Kim's personal journey, the work of Take A Part, and the unexpected effects that attending ICAF has had on their future practice.

On Culture of Possibility podcast #30, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard reflect on topics that are currently burning a hole in their brains: Topics such as: us vs. them; what cultural democracy means and why some people can’t get it; being a little braver. Tune in and let us know what you think!

Hannah Kemp-Welch is a sound artist with a social practice. She creates works collaboratively and in community settings, often responding to social issues. Recent projects include ‘The Right to Record’ (2021) - a creative campaign with disabled activists, which successfully lobbied the Government to change a harmful clause within the benefits system; ‘Meet Me on the Radio’ (2020-21) - a weekly Resonance FM programme co-produced with elders isolated during lockdown; and ‘o-o-radio!’ (2023) - a...