With this podcast we begin a new series, Meanwhile on an Abandoned Bookshelf, in which we discuss books that mean something to us or have a particular importance for us. While we might sometimes discuss new books we will mostly concentrate on older and overlooked publications.
In this episode Owen Kelly and David Morley discuss Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century written by Christian Caryl and published in 2014.
Neither of them agree with Caryl’s political position but instead argue about the usefulness of the approach he takes to history. Rather than following an issue he traces five plot-threads across the year 1979 and argues that they intertwine in significant ways that narrative-based conventional history overlooks.
David Morley is emeritus professor at the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths in the University of London.

This month contains five Fridays and so on Friday Number Five we continue an irregular series of podcasts of music issued under Creative Commons licences: this time we have music to think about as autumn fades into winter.
The music consists in this episode consists of five different variations on one reasonably well known piece of baroque music. The variations reveal different approaches to the piece from musicians of various backgrounds, interests, and abilities.
The music also raises questions about how far and in what ways musicians may tamper with this music as compared to how far they might tamper with a piece of music by, for example, Gershwin. It raises issues about how the current copyright laws restrain our abilities and prevent contemporary musics from becoming a part of the common culture, in the way that nineteenth century and earlier music has become.
Owen Kelly raises some of these questions prior to examining them in more detail in a forthcoming episode of Genuine Inquiry.

Timo Cantell works as the director of the Urban Research and Statistics Unit of the City of Helsinki, a unit of 35 people within the city council charged with gathering data, and publishing it in ways that the citizens of Helsinki can use.
In this episode Timo Cantell talks with Owen Kelly about the ways in which the city approaches the collection, distribution and publication of public data. They discuss Kvartti, a printed and online publication produced each quarter. They talk about the approach Helsinki has adopted towards open data, and the ways in which the unit Timo leads can developed APIs so that people and organisations can analyse, combine and mix the city’s datastreams with other publicly available information.
Timo Cantell also deals with the approach of the city to the ethics of data collection, and the growing public resistance towards having personal data repurposed without explicit permission.

In the 10th episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard talks with Gary Stewart, an artist and experimental sonic musician based in London.
Arlene and Gary first met more than 30 years ago in a community arts project, and his work since that time has taken him to Africa, Latin America, the U.S., and numerous spaces in the white-box gallery and prestige festival worlds.
In this episode, Gary explains how he came to do the work he does. He explains about Dub Morphology and their approach to their work. He and Arlene explore the possibilities and challenges of bringing the emergent, co-creative, egalitarian values of community-based arts practice into other types of creation and interaction, putting marginalized voices at the forefront, and the powerful results when kids in Brazilian favelas are trusted to master the full complexity of their art.

Sophie Hope has worked as an artist and an academic. She currently works at Birkbeck, part of the University of London. Since 2010 she has co-developed a network of practice-based research students at Birkbeck, called Corkscrew. She also chairs the School of Arts Disability Committee and serves as a member of the Peltz/Arts Space Steering Committee, Birkbeck Institute of Gender and Sexuality (BIGS) and Centre for Museum Cultures Research Centre Steering Committee.
She describes her academic work as socially engaged research and in this episode of Genuine Inquiry she reflects on what the term “socially engaged research” might mean. She discusses issues of consent, power relations, and trust, among others.

In this bite-sized shorter-than-usual episode Owen Kelly offers two surprises and a look back at Clive Sinclair and the impact of the ZX Spectrum, which ushered in a brief period of democratic bedroom coding.
For a short period the ZX Spectrum, and its rivals the Commodore 64 and the BBC Micro, created an ecosystem of bedroom hobbyists-turned entrepreneurs, cassette-based games, and monthly magazines that advertised and reviewed them. The coders formed the primary audience for each other’s work and offered living examples of what Alvin Toffler referred to as prosumers.
This opened up a range of possibilities that slowly closed again as one-person companies merged until eventually more powerful computers and the emergence of giant companies like Electronic Arts turned the computer games ecology into a “proper” market in which highly paid teams of coders made proprietary games for audiences entirely different from themselves.

Rob Watson runs projects using radio and podcasting to facilitate community development, and to construct a social economy model based on the belief that people should be empowered to tell their own stories.
In this episode Rob talks to Sophie Hope about researcher positionality, the importance of authentic participation in socially engaged research, and what positive steps we might take to ensure the effective communication of important messages for ensuring meaningful engagement, improving trust in our institutions, and building a better society.
Note: this episode forms a special festival edition and is also published as one of the Corkscrew podcasts.

In the ninth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard talks with Meena Natarajan, Artistic and Executive Director of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Chrissie Orr, community artist and cofounder of Seed Broadcast in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In this episode, they talk about the Seed Syllables project, facilitating dialogues with 32 community artists and cultural activists to offer a composite portrait of life in the quadruple pandemic of virus, racial violence, economic meltdown, and climate crisis — and what comes next.