On April 26 and 27 the Raymond Williams Society held its annual conference which addressed the topic: Cultural Production and the Redundancy of Work: precarity, automation and critique. The Movement for Cultural Democracy organised a panel at the conference and Sophie Hope, Nick Mahony and Stephen Pritchard spoke at it.
In this episode Sophie Hope describes some of the context to Owen Kelly, and we listen to live recordings of Nick and Stephen’s presentations.

In 2016 John Fail and Agnieszka Pokrywka began the first in a series of cultural experiments. They called it Temporary and they envisaged it as a space that would be owned by the people using it.
Agnieszka talks with Owen Kelly about the ideas that fuelled the experiments, and explains what they learned and how she would approach the ideas if she ever decided to do something similar in the future.

Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly use the twentieth episode of Meanwhile In An Abandoned Warehouse to look back at what has and hasn’t happened in the discussions so far. They discuss a number of ideas that have stuck in their minds, or served to start further explorations; and debate where they might go next.

Sophie Hope talks 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, and they reflect on the processes they have used, the people they have met, the energy that they have encountered, and what they have learned from their work.

The idea of cultural democracy does not necessarily always wear that label. In different parts of the world it has acquired different names, and part of our quest is the attempt to discover it wherever we can find it hiding.
In this episode, Cathy Hunt, founder and co-director of Positive Solutions, discusses the nature of community cultural development in Australia, and its relationship to ideas of cultural democracy.
Cathy begins with a short discussion about the Women of the World festival, with which she is involved, before moving on to talk about Scott Rankin’s recent platform paper on the subject of cultural rights and the debates that this has triggered.
We then move on to look at First Nation cultural rights and cultural activism, and the different forms that cultural tourism can take, and the perennial questions of who controls it and who benefits from it.
Economics is inseparable from culture, and vice versa. The discussion about cultural tourism in its good and bad forms adds to useful extra dimension to the question of cultural democracy.
As usual, Sophie’s baby Henry plays an active role in the proceedings from time to time, and you will catch his reactions to the various topics under discussion.

Alison Jeffers talks with Sophie Hope about how she got drawn into the community arts movement, and her personal journey from then to now. They discuss how the ways in which community arts has changed direction and developed as the wider culture has changed; about the effects that the community arts movement has and hasn’t had; and what might happen next.
The conversation springs from the fact that Alison Jeffers co-edited Culture Democracy and the Right to Make Art with artist Gerri Moriarty. The book contains twelve chapters that look at the community arts movement from the 1980s until 2017, when Bloomsbury Methuen published it.
In 2018 the book was awarded Gold Open Access status, enabled through institutional funds from the University of Manchester, so you can read it online for free!

Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Susanna Paasonen on her research into amateur and user-generated porn. They talk about the long and poorly documented history of user-generated erotic media and how this has both reflected and stimulated changes in technology. Does amateur porn stand outside the market place as an example of a self-selecting community engaged in a participatory culture of a more or less democratic nature? Or is it simply a shallow reflection of the dominant culture? The answer, you will be pleased to learn, proves not as simple as that.

Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk to Abhijit Sinha about the nooks that Project Defy initiate. They discuss how nooks work, and what they mean for developing activism around maker spaces in Indian society. Finally Abhijit explains why ideas about cultural democracy do not feature much in political discussion in India yet, and how he thinks they might become useful.