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.

Joe Lambert is one of the originators of the digital storytelling phenomenon and founder and Executive Director of Storycenter, an international participatory media training and consulting nonprofit organization based in Berkeley. Nearly 30 years on, he talks with Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso about the practice, its ethics and values, its challenges, and its power.

For a short time in the early twenty first century Second Life, and other “virtual worlds” became a matter of general interest. Pundits saw them as the beginning of the 3D web. In the last eighteen months this kind of idea has come round again as Mark Zuckerberg has insisted that people should no longer see Facebook as a social media company, but instead seee the newly rebranded Meta as a company dedicated to bringing the metaverse to life.
From 2004 Owen Kelly spent eight years researching inside Second Life and during this time he worked with staff and students at Arcada to create a large island there called Rosario where groups of students worked. From this he developed a series of ideas about the way that so-called virtual reality actually works.
In this episode he expands on a lecture he first presented at the Max Planck Society in Hamburg in November, 2018 to inquire into what Meta actually has in mind for us.
You will find a reading list and a set of useful links for this audio essay on the page for this podcast at miaaw.net.

In this episode, François Matarasso argues that “The values and practices of contemporary European culture are still defined by ideas that emerged during the Enlightenment, and the period of industrialisation and imperialism with which it is associated. There are older influences, of course: opera emerged in Renaissance Italy, which itself took inspiration from the Classical past. But it is the Enlightenment’s invention of the Fine Arts that implicitly (and carelessly) relegated most human culture to a subordinate position as the ‘not-fine arts’, defined by adjectives such as amateur, traditional, folk or popular arts, as well as new concepts like craft and entertainment.”
He discusses the alternative views of community based arts and concludes that “ to judge from Arts Council England’s strategy document, neither tradition seems to be properly understood by those making cultural policy. Nor do they have an alternative political theory to offer. We are left with no more than good intentions in the place of the democratically accountable exercise of power.”
François Matarasso originally wrote the essay from which this episode springs in 2021 as part of ‘Opera Co-creation and performance’ for the Traction Project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It was published on the Traction website in May 2021. This version was published on 5 August 2022 on ParliamentofDreams.com under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence.

On months that have a fifth Friday we break from our normal schedule and produce something else related in one way or another to cultural democracy. In 2022 we delve into radio archives to bring back some historical examples of serials and comedies that let us hear unfiltered aspects of the world as it seemed to our grandparents.
In this episode we go back to June 21, 1950 to listen to episode 15 of the science fiction series Two Thousand Plus. The series aired over the Mutual network from the spring of 1950 until very early in 1952. Nearly 100 30-minute episodes were produced although fewer than 20 survive as recordings.
These stories reflect the times in which they were written, and they provide a glimpse of the way mainstream media in the middle of the twentieth century viewed what they regarded as the future, and we regard as the present. Their version of the future reflects all the assumptions, biases, and prejudices of conventional nineteen fifties thinking. As such it offers us a way of understanding how we got here, and the baggage we brought with us.

A Common Practice episode.
In this episode we delve into the ever-expanding Miaaw archives to catch Sophie Hope in June 2019, talking with Sally Labern, an artist and activist living and working in north London.
They have a long and detailed discussion about the specificities of cultural organising.
They both live in the London Borough of Walthamstow, and they have both worked locally - separately and together - and they reflect on the processes they have used, the people they have encountered, the way alliances, collectives and friendships form, the problems they have encountered and the struggles they have had, and what they have learned from their work.