Ken Worpole and Owen Kelly discuss the question: why do we always need 'experiments in living' to see what works and doesn't work in how people live and work together? And why do these experiments never seem to reach a conclusion?
Their conversation begins with a book of Ken Worpole’s called New Jerusalem: the good city and the good society, and moves to discuss the social origins of the model towns and garden cities that spread across England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They ask what effects these had on people’s living circumstances, their culture, and their belief in democracy.

In this episode François Matarasso reads a presentation that he originally gave at Handelsbeurs in Ghent in Belgium on 6 October 2015 at the first International Symposium of the Social Impact of Making Music research centre of the Ghent University Association.
He argues that “whatever judgements we make about individual projects, we need a good understanding of what is happening and why, if we use a term such as the social impact of music-making. We should not adopt unquestioningly the thinking of those who recognise, however simplistically, the transformative power of the arts and expect to harness it for their own purposes. Whatever we think of those purposes, whether we share them or contest them, the problem is that they make some deeply misleading assumptions when they are applied to arts practice”.

On months that have a fifth Friday we break from our normal schedule and produce something tangentially related to ideas of cultural democracy. In 2022 we delve into the history of radio to bring back some historical examples of comedies, documentaries, and serials that let us hear unfiltered aspects of the world as it seemed to our grandparents.
In this episode we go back to June 3, 1956 to listen to an episode of the western series Gunsmoke. The series takes place in and around Dodge City, Kansas, in the post-Civil War era and centers on United States Marshall Matt Dillon as he attempts to enforce law and order in the city. It also focuses on Dillon's friendship with Doc Adams, the town's physician; Kitty Russell, owner of the Long Branch Saloon; and Chester, Dillon's deputy.
CBS intended Dillon as a "Philip Marlowe of the Old West", and Gunsmoke as a western series for adults. The writers emphasised the brutal nature of the so-called Old West. Charles Meston, the head writer felt disgusted by the archetypal Western hero and set out "to destroy [that type of] character he loathed". In Meston's view, "Dillon was almost as scarred as the homicidal psychopaths who drifted into Dodge from all directions." In many ways it served as an ancestor of series like Deadwood.

Jubilee Arts was a unique community arts organisation based in Sandwell in the Black Country, in the West Midlands of England. The group made a point of documenting their work, which they have worked hard to establish as a living archive. The archive documents the period 1974-94, two decades of tremendous change.
On the archive website they explain that “Locked away in the basement of West Bromwich Town Hall since the last century, in 2014-15 we dusted off the archive boxes, bringing them back to the light of day to share some our findings through a series of workshops, exhibitions and events”.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks with Beverley Harvey and Brendan Jackson, both long time members of Jubilee Arts and co-founders of the archive project, about the archive, its purpose, and its future.

François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard discuss power in the context of cultural institutions.
For cultural democrats, when does working with institutions promise real change and when does the lumbering power of institutions perpetuate the status quo despite best efforts?
In episode 21, with some funny and some infuriating stories about their work with arts agencies and foundations, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso offer insights and guiding questions that help to clarify a confusing question.

This inquiry has a convoluted beginning. While on holiday in the north of England recently Owen Kelly found himself given a copy of a newspaper called The Light. This seemed at first like the ravings of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists. On further reading, however, it appeared more interesting than that. It proposed that the germ theory of disease transmission contained fundamental flaws.
In this episode Owen Kelly looks into the history of the controversy, and the competing claims of the germ theory and the terrain theory. He discovers a bad-tempered discussion that obscures as much as it reveals, with both sides offering dubious evidence and drawing unwarranted conclusions.
He asks how this relates to citizen science, and what it means for the informed discussion necessary to any cultural democracy.

In this episode François Matarasso reads a revised text of a speech given at the International Congress on Intangible Heritage Policy, at Willibrordhaege, Deurne, The Netherlands, on 16 February 2012. In this he discusses the differences between folk culture and heritage, and the relationships that both of these have to the concepts and practices of art.
He moves on to look at intangible heritage: what UNESCO has described as “oral traditions, performing arts, social practices, rituals, and cultural knowledge”. He looks at how this vast field might be safeguarded and developed, ans what we would need to do that.
François Matarasso published this version of the paper on 2 September 2022 at https://parliamentofdreams.com and https://miaaw.net © 2022 François Matarasso, under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International licence.

On her website, Arlene Tucker explains her practice like this: “As an artist, diversity agent and educator, I add play elements and awareness to daily life through my art and interactions. Inspired by translation studies, animals and nature, I find ways to connect and make meaning in our shared environments. My artistic work is often process-based and it creates spaces and situations for exchange, dialogue, and transformations to occur and surprise all players. I am interested in creating projects that open up ideas and that engage the viewer; that invite the viewer to be a part of the narrative or art creation process. In translation, your participation continues to propel the story.”
In this episode she talks with Owen Kelly about her life, her training in Georgia, her work, and her decision to turn her house into a project where people can stay, play and work.