Sophie Hope and Jenny Richards started Manual Labours in 2013 as a research project exploring our physical and emotional relationships to work. The Global Staffroom grew out of this, and Owen Kelly talks to them about it.
The project reconsiders current time-based structures of work (when does work start and end?) and reasserts the significance of the physical (manual) aspect of immaterial, affective and emotional labour. It has gone through five disctinct phases so far.
As part of the current phases Jenny and Sophie launched a live video podcast on Twitch.tv called The Global Staffroom. This took the form of “a live podcast we hosted involving conversations and interviews with people about what it feels like to care, be cared for, not be able to care at work. Over 14 weeks during lockdown, every Monday lunchtime we brought together guests from different workforces and geographies to discuss architecture of home-work, racialised experiences of lockdown, emotional labour of health workers, social reproduction and remote working.
The podcast was subsequently purchased and archived by The Edinburgh University Art Collection.”

In the second episode of "A Culture of Possibility," Francois Matarasso and Arlene Goldbard talk with Amber Hansen and Reyna Hernandez, community muralists in South Dakota, USA. The conversation touches on the importance and challenges of portraying Indigenous themes in public art, particularly in rural America; making participatory work during the pandemic; and sustaining community arts work within the U.S. support system.

In this audio essay Sophie Hope inquires into the digital while thinking about processes of evaluation.
She addresses two questions. Firstly, how and why do people in the arts understand what they do? Secondly, who speaks and who listens?
There are 5 parts to this audio essay:
Part 1: Intro;
Part 2: Key terms;
Part 3: Data is king;
Part 4: Data discrimination;
Part 5: Big data and Cultural democracy.

The last few weeks have seen shares in Gamestop, a bricks and mortar games store that has seen declining sales over recent years, suddenly and dramatically increase in price. Initially puzzling, it quickly became clear that a sub-reddit had banded together to deliberately push the share price up in order to cause pain to professional investors who had begun to short the stock.
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss the way that this has unfolded to date, and its resemblance to the first economic bubble: the Dutch tulip mania of 1637. They ask whether this amounts to the empowerment of the ordinary person or an invitation to reckless stupidity.

Agnieszka Pokrywka has a long-standing interest in fermentation and we talk to her about Ferment Lab in Helsinki, and its spin-off Ferment Radio.
Fermentation has grown from a technique for making beer, cheese and pickles into a much larger area of cultural discussion that covers a wide range of interlocking topics.
In this episode of Common Practice we discuss feminist and queer theories of fermentation and the long-standing role of Sandor Katz in the fermentation revivalist movement.
In the best tradition of launching new things every copy of this podcast comes with a FREE PODCAST!
Beyond a certain point talking about a podcast becomes pointless without an opportunity to listen to it. We have therefore kept our conversation to a short introduction before playing Aga’s favourite episode of Ferment Radio so far: episode 10 featuring a conversation with Stephanie Maroney.
We last spoke with Agnieszka Pokrywka in Episode 21 of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse about a project she co-founded called Temporary that looked to expand the idea of a self-directed venue into discussions of interaction and responsibility.

"Hope must be reinvented every day.” James Baldwin
Hosted by Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso, this monthly series explores people, projects, and topics that expand possibility and choice through cultural work.
Our interests intersect in community arts and cultural policy (both broadly defined). Within those subjects, we see questions of possibility, choice, and hope as critical – especially now, as humanity struggles with the pandemic, climate crisis, and growing inequality. Virtually every community arts project engages people in working for the futures they desire, even if only on a local scale. Often that means overcoming a reluctance to get one’s hopes up for fear of being disappointed. Community artists and cultural democrats know that without dreaming together, our hopes can never be realized.
When we interview people, it won’t be just to to hear their work described, but to explore why they do it, what it means, how they hope it will engage others, what influence or change they are seeking, and so on. With each podcast, our plan is to begin with a conversation with a guest, then conclude with the two of us reflecting on what was expressed. Although we know a lot of people in our generational cohort—community arts veterans—our hope is to hear as much from younger guests reflecting on what’s happening now and what may be coming.

In the first episode of our new monthly audio essay Genuine Inquiry, Sophie Hope examines the relationship between money, culture and democracy.
She does this in the context of developments in arts management and policy, and she does this with reference to the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, north east London.
Sophie draws from two key texts: The End of Cultural Policy?, published in 2018, and Cultural Policies in the Age of Platforms, published in 2017.

Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse went on holiday on August 28, 2020, when Episode 50 went live. Our intention was to take a short break to rethink our long term strategy. For various reasons, including the covid-19 inspired lockdowns and the consequences of moving all professional activity online, the holiday lasted four months rather than the intended four weeks.
In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly look back at 2020 and where they have got to so far. They discuss the differences that the pandemic has made to their professional and personal lives. They look at what they have learned from lecturing or running workshops with groups of students over Teams or Zoom for the last nine months.
They explain their plans for Miaaw in 2021. These include expanding the website, introducing a monthly newsletter, and expanding the podcasts from every other week to weekly. They will form a foundation for creating ways of building the audience into an active community.
Every month will have now four separate but related podcasts: each with a clear mission, and all connected directly to conversations about cultural democracy and the commons. Next week we begin Episode 1 of Genuine Inquiry...