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.

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.