François Matarasso presents an audio essay suggesting that, as an area of conscious policy, culture has never been more important to democratic states than it is today.
He argues that its importance grew throughout the 20th century as rapidly growing and changing mass media pushed governments to control or restrain its influence. In the past, patronage and repression had been crude but sufficient mechanisms for rulers to extend cultural influence. But in large, democratic, industrial societies, the complexity of cultural activity demanded more sophisticated responses.

In the second part of a two episode podcast, Professor Ana Laura López de la Torre and Sophie Hope discuss the specific role and function of ‘extensión’ at the Universidad de la República, Uruguay.
All academic activity is organised under 3 essential functions: teaching, research and extensión. This last function - loosely translated as ‘outreach’ - is a distinctive element of the Latin-American university movement. Extensión mandates public universities to serve society and the public good. Over the years, the way this has been interpreted and put in practice has changed alongside ideas of democracy, equality, social justice and inclusion. Today, ‘critical extensión’ is a complex field of theoretical and methodological innovation, connected to the fields of critical pedagogy, southern epistemologies and decolonial thought.
Ana Laura talks us through this function of the university and gives us a detailed account of current project working with students and an old site of detention and torture during the dictatorship.

In Episode 23 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard interview Carol Bebelle, cofounder of Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans, about her decades of work for cultural democracy.
Carol “has to her credit a book of original poetry In a Manner of Speaking, and is presented among other New Orleans writers in the Anthology From a Bend in the River, edited by Kalamu ya Salaam. She has several published interviews, testimonies and a chapter in the recently published Civic Engagement in the Wake of Katrina, edited by Amy Koritz and George J. Sanchez”.
This makes for a vivid and uplifting conversation that touches on Hurricane Katrina, racial healing, the power of art and culture to root us in heritage and envision a future we want to help bring about.
Listen and be inspired!

According to Wikipedia, “Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (14 April 1891 – 6 December 1956) was an Indian jurist, economist, social reformer and political leader who headed the committee drafting the Constitution of India from the Constituent Assembly debates, served as Law and Justice minister in the first cabinet of Jawaharlal Nehru, and inspired the Dalit Buddhist movement after renouncing Hinduism”.
It goes on to say that “Ambedkar's legacy as a socio-political reformer had a deep effect on modern India. In post-Independence India, his socio-political thought is respected across the political spectrum. His initiatives have influenced various spheres of life and transformed the way India today looks at socio-economic policies, education and affirmative action through socio-economic and legal incentives. His reputation as a scholar led to his appointment as free India's first law minister, and chairman of the committee for drafting the constitution. He passionately believed in individual freedom and criticised caste society. His accusations of Hinduism as being the foundation of the caste system made him controversial and unpopular among Hindus. His conversion to Buddhism sparked a revival in interest in Buddhist philosophy in India and abroad”.
His work, straddling the line between inside and outside, between reform and revolution, between society and the individual, between religion and spirituality, offers many lessons to those interested in cultural democracy. In this episode Owen Kelly points out just a few of them.

François Matarasso reads a presentation that he originally gave as a lecture in Kirkwall, in Orkney, on 27 September 2014.
He begins by considering the poet Robert Rendall, who “was, like many Orcadians, something of a polymath, publishing on literature, natural history, archaeology and theology as well as being a painter, a fisherman and a successful businessman. Shore Poems was Rendall’s third collection and though Edinburgh and London critics may have neglected it, the book was appreciated in Orkney, where the author was held in high regard”.
The specificity of the poems - the “particularly Orcadian balancing of here and there” - leads to a discussion of wider aspects of Orcadian culture and the implications of Dunbar’s number in this context.
Echoing Wendell Berry, François notes that “Everywhere is not the same and the people who live there are not the same either. The culture of Orkney is the unique creation of interaction between people and place, coming and going, over centuries”.

In the first of a 2 part podcast, Professor Ana Laura López de la Torre discusses the history and democratic structures of the Universidad de la República, Uruguay with Sophie Hope.
Ana Laura López de la Torre is a Professor in the Facultad de Artes, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay and for 2022-23 is an Honorary Research Fellow with the School of Arts, Birkbeck. She has an established participatory arts and research practice established between 2000 and 2012 when she lived and worked in London, with major commissions from the ICA, Whitechapel Gallery, Gasworks, Tate Modern and South London Gallery, La Casa Encendida (Spain), de kunstbank (Belgium) and Demokratische Kunstwochen (Switzerland). She also worked as Associate Lecturer at the University of the Arts, London.
Since moving back to Uruguay in 2012 she has been the Director of the Centro Cultural Florencio Sánchez, a public cultural centre in Cerro, a historical neighbourhood in the periphery of Montevideo. She continued to develop her participatory arts practice in the region, developing projects related to community-based organisation, cultural democracy and environmental struggles in Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Brazil. From 2012 to 2015 she was the Coordinator of the first Uruguayan postgraduate course in Cultural Management, at the Espacio Interdisciplinario of the Universidad de la República, where she still teaches and is part of its Academic Advisory Board. In her current post at the Universidad de la República, she leads a department specialised in community-based art, and within this department she is Coordinator of two interdisciplinary research groups: Naturaleza, Sociedad y Arte (exploring human / more-than-human relationship in urban communities) and ACTO (Art, Organised Communities and Territories).
The Universidad de la República is the public university of Uruguay. Founded in 1849, it enrols over 150 thousand students annually. It offers free tuition at undergraduate and postgraduate level in all disciplines and fields of knowledge. With its main infrastructure in Montevideo, over the last 30 years the university has embarked in a decentralisation process, creating 10 university campuses in different cities.
Although fully funded by the state, the autonomy of the university’s governance was enshrined in a national law in 1958 following 20 years of organised action by students. The governing bodies of all the Faculties and Institutes (and its central authorities) are democratically elected, with representation of teachers, students and graduate bodies, all academic, political and managerial decisions are taken by these bodies. Voting is compulsory and takes place every 4 years. The term ‘university democracy’ encompasses this form of self-governance, which over the decades has produced the ethical guides that rule academic life.

In Episode 22 of A Culture of Possibility, François Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard interview Yuriy Vulkovsky about his decades of experience working with communities and institutions in Bulgaria and nearby states.
You’ll learn about Bulgaria’s network of 3700 independent community cultural centers, a unique feature of this culture; and from vivid stories that illuminate the challenges and opportunities in engaging people and resources in a country marked by poverty and history, where people “live in different centuries.”

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.