This month, Owen Kelly joins Arlene Goldbard to discuss a report entitled “State of Culture” from Culture Action Europe, which describes itself as "the major European network of cultural networks, organisations, artists, activists, academics and policymakers. As the only intersectoral network it brings together members and strategic partners from all areas of culture. Culture Action Europe is the political voice of the cultural sector in Europe...."
The group was new to both of us, but since CAE says of itself that "we take care of the cultural ecosystem," cultural democracy is one of the tags on its website, and a few posts mentioning François Matarasso appear, we decided to study the 163-page report so you don't have to!
Tune in to find out what the political voice of the European cultural sector is thinking and saying these days.

Angharad Davies is an artist and architectural researcher, and a member of public works. Her research examines the communities that exist around local, publicly accessible spaces. She believes in architecture as biography, and writing as an architectural process.
In this episode, we hear about her long term work with communities at Rurban in Poplar, London, and the activities and approaches they use to build relationships with local residents.

Owen Kelly talks to Ken Worpole about just some of the adventures of Colin Ward during his adventurous and varied life. JANUARY 3 | SERIES 2025
STREAM Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse | EPISODE 79 
PARTICIPANTS
Owen Kelly | Ken Worpole
COMMENTARY
In London, on March 29, 2010, The Daily Telegraph published an obituary that began like this. “Colin Ward, who has died aged 85, was Britain's leading anarchist, a pioneer of adventure playgrounds and a champion of allotment holders and tenant co-operatives; he was the former editor of Anarchy magazine and an unlikely holder of the post of education officer of the Town and Country Planning Association”.
His life covered a lot of different territory from architecture to education. He lived “an anarchism rooted in everyday experience, and not necessarily linked to industrial and political struggles. His ideas were heavily influenced by Peter Kropotkin and his concept of mutual aid”.
In his 1973 book <em>Anarchy in Action</em> he wrote “The argument of this book is that an anarchist society, a society which organizes itself without authority, is always in existence, like a seed beneath the snow, buried under the weight of the state and its bureaucracy, capitalism and its waste, privilege and its injustices, nationalism and its suicidal loyalties, religious differences and their superstitious separatism”.
Ken Worpole knew Colin Ward well for many years, and has contributed a chapter to a new book, <em>Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchism</em>, celebrating his life, thought, and work. In this episode he talks with Owen Kelly about some aspects of these. 
REFERENCES
Colin Ward: a biography on Wikipedia
Roman Krznaric: an appreciation of the chuckling anarchist
Wayne Price: What can we learn from Colin Ward?
 
Mutual Aid, Everyday Anarchism at Five Leaves Press 
The death of Blair Peach, which Ken mentions

François Matarasso is taking a break for medical treatment. We hope he will rejoin us very soon.
On episode 47 of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard interviews Clementine Sandison, an artist who works with people in Scotland to build solidarity networks, improve livelihoods and access to training for landworkers, and campaigns on land justice.
Clementine works as co-Director of Alexandra Park Food Forest, a community greenspace in the East end of Glasgow where volunteers produce food, cook and share meals, organize community celebrations, and explore notions of commoning and how to steward public land.

This episode addresses the question: should embedding creative enterprise models be a fundamental approach to sustaining the future of Socially Engaged Art?
Hannah Kemp-Welch & Sophie Hope talk with Kathrin Böhm from Company Drinks, a community space and cultural enterprise based in Barking and Dagenham; and Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell from Bank Job and Power Station, based in the London Borough of Walthamstow. All three of them participated in Social Making iteration 5.
Company Drinks works as a long term project in which each step of the production, distribution, and planning operates as a public space. They have produced drinks from handpicked ingredients for ten years now, and use social enterprise models as part of their arts practice.
Power Station grew out of a previous project called Bank Job that took over a high street bank and attempted to create an equitable local economy. Power Station works towards making a street in Waltham Forest into a collective power station, with long term plans to create a borough wide, communally owned solar power company.
Note:
Social Making iteration 5 took place on October 10 and 11, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

The Museum of Unrest acts as a not-for-profit educational project to support artists designers and communities engaged in art and design linked to social and environmental justice. The project is an online continuation of an organisation that has supported
art and social engagement since 1975 when it opened in west London as Paddington Printshop and subsequently became londonprintstudio. Faced with Covid and rising costs the londonprintstudio facilities closed in 2020 but gave birth to the Museum of Unrest.
The first collection went online in January 2024 and included commissioned articles, interviews and links on the topic of artists’ and activists’ museums. The second collection went online last month. Curated by Clive Russell it asks the question: what might we mean by “good design”?
In this episode Owen Kelly talks to John Phillips and Clive Russell about their work, the museum, and where it might all lead.

Some months have five Fridays, and when this happens add an extra podcast to our normal schedule. In 2021 we played music licensed under creative commons licences; in 2022 we excavated four old radio shows; and in 2023 we looked back at four early classics from Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse.
This year we have found another podcast that we think might interest you: one published under a Creative Commons licence that somehow connects to things here at Miaaw.
This month we go to the heart of enshittification, and listen to episode 438 of Cory Doctorow’s own podcast. He takes Tiktok as an example and lays out his theory of enshittification, using that as an example.
His podcast varies between reading extracts from his novels, reading extracts from his books, and pulling together his thoughts on current cultural and political issues. Many other episodes will prove worth your time, and he has them all stored at archive.org.

As part of the fifth edition of Social Making: “the UK’s only biennial symposium dedicated to socially engaged art practice, co-creation, and place-making” Kim Wide and Anurupa Roy led a workshop exploring the implications of jugaad.
Kim Wide works as the founder and director of Take A Part. Anurupa Roy works as an award-winning puppet designer and director of puppet-based theatre.
The BBC has described jugaad as “an untranslatable word for winging it”. The word exists in Hindu, Urdu and Punjabi and describes using whatever you have to hand to make something you need; a process of frugal improvisation.
In this episode Sophie Hope and Hannah Kemp-Welch talk to them about the workshop; about the nature of jugaad, as a global practice of subversion by radical practice,; the collective politics that fuel jugaad; and what it might actually mean in an English, or European, context.
Note:
Social Making iteration 5 took place at Brix on October 10 and 11, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.