According to their web site, “Take A Part are the UK's leading socially engaged art (SEA) organisation, dedicated to supporting, furthering and sustaining SEA practice, community co-creation and community embedding placemaking in the UK.
We take a community-first approach to culture, supporting areas and people underrepresented and underserved in our society to develop cultural confidence, advocacy and skills to take action on change in their own communities through culture.
Our home is Plymouth, where we develop and test our models of best practice, but we work across the UK and internationally to support a larger community voice in our cultural sector. We have worked with large scale cultural institutions, universities, scientists, local authorities, trust and foundations and think tanks to centre communities in practice.”
Take A Part organises Social Making: “the UK’s only biennial symposium dedicated to socially engaged art practice, co-creation, and place-making”. In this episode Hannah Kemp-Wech and Sophie Hope talk to Kim Wide, the CEO and artistic director of Take A Part, about the symposium which will take place in Bristol on October 10 and 11.
This episode acts as an introduction to a multi-part series that Miaaw.net and Take A Part will begin broadcasting on Friday October 25, with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Every year some months have five Fridays, and every time this happens we find something to do there: something out of our normal schedule. We try to adopt an annual theme. In 2021 we played music licensed under creative commons licences; in 2022 we found four old radio shows; and in 2023 we looked back to four early episodes of Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse.
This year whenever we find ourselves in the fifth Friday of a month we will look around us and find a podcast that interests us: one published under a Creative Commons licence that relates in one way or another to our areas of interest.
This month we return to the Bees of Bensham, a project we looked at in June in episode 036 of Common Practice. They now have a podcast available. Created by Mattie, a writer and perfomer from Northumberland, the series of podcasts involves interviews with some of the artists, ecologists, naturalists, bee experts and enthusiasts and residents involved in the project.
We asked Ben Jones, founder of Dingy Butterflies, to pick an episode for us to rebroadcast, and this is the one that he chose: an episode in which Mattie interviews Barbara Keating, the lead artist on the project.

Barry Sykes lives and works in Walthamstow, London. He makes sculptures, drawings and performance about authenticity, interaction and pleasure, often working at the edges of value, skill and acceptable behaviour. Recent projects have looked at fake laughter exercises, social nudity and sauna culture, using group participation and various handmade processes like cyanotype photography, life-drawing and rough ceramics.
In this episode Sophie Hope and Barry Sykes sit in Barry's studio in Walthamstow and discuss his current art project exploring permissable spaces for respite, refusal and reclining through drawing, making, waiting, witnessing and sweating.

On episode 43 of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with France Trépanier and Chris Creighton-Kelly, based in British Columbia.
France is a visual artist, curator and researcher of Kanien’kéha:ka and French ancestry; Chris is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and cultural critic born in the UK with South Asian/British roots.
Together, they direct Primary Colours/Couleurs primaires, a multi-year arts initiative whose main objective is to place Indigenous arts at the centre of the Canadian arts system through gatherings, public presentations, incubation projects, residencies, research and more aimed at generating new knowledge.

Artist Jorge Lucero is Full Professor of Art Education in the School of Art + Design. For eight years he was the Chair of the Art Education Program. Now he serves as Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. Lucero studied at the Pennsylvania State University and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Prior to being at the University of Illinois, he happily taught art and art history at the Chicago Public School Northside College Prep. Jorge Lucero has performed, published, lectured, exhibited, and taught widely in the United States and abroad.
In 2023, Lucero was named the National Art Education Association’s (NAEA) Higher Ed Educator of the Year.
‘Conceptual Art and Teaching’ is a project initiated by Jorge Lucero who joins Hannah Kemp-Welch for the tenth episode of Ways of Listening to consider listening within critical pedagogy and as a daily practice.
He draws attention to both the humility and the ‘slowness’ needed for listening.

Susan Jones worked as the director of a-n The Artists Information Company from 1980 to 2014. Her doctoral thesis Artists livelihoods: the artists in arts policy conundrum, Manchester Metropolitan University 2015-2019, exposed baseline flaws in the interrelationship between arts policies and artists’ livelihoods over the last 30 years and articulated a unique new rationale for better support to artists that could enable many more to pursue livelihoods through art practices over a life cycle.
She now works as an independent arts researcher and writer who holds specialist knowledge and insight about the social and political environment for artists and contemporary visual arts.
She has published an essay in the latest issue of Art Monthly looking at the possibility of a new deal for cultural practitioners. In the light of the new UK Labour government, and the opportunities that may or may not bring, Owen Kelly talks to Susan Jones about possible futures.
After the recording Susan pointed out that Owen had referred several times to something called “arts monthly”, when he meant Art Monthly; and that he had mispronounced Nicholas Serota’s name. He should have said Nick Ser-OH-ta.

On April 26 and 27, 2019, seven months before Jeremy Corbyn led the British Labour party to unexpected defeat in a general election, the Raymond Williams Society held its annual conference. Now, in July 2024, as Keir Starmer celebrates a landslide victory for the Labour party, and a new Labour government prepares its long-term agenda, we present a completely re-edited and remixed look at the session on cultural democracy.
The conference 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.
Nick Mahony’s presentation, “Realising Cultural Democracy”, provides a historical background for the growth of the Movement for Cultural Democracy. He draws a link between the writing of Raymond Williams in The Long Revolution and the birth of this current manifestation of a movement for cultural democracy that began at The World Transformed in Liverpool, in September 2017.
Stephen Pritchard reflects on his childhood in Jarrow in a performance style lecture that uses video and archival sound recordings as part of the presentation. The presentation, “Home Is Where We Start From”, has a poetic air that weaves in critiques of the way working class culture has been deliberately co-opted or dismantled; and the ways in which gentrification and art-washing continue to attempt to do this.

It’s episode 42 of A Culture of Possibility, which means no guest this time. Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk about some of the words commonly used in discussions of cultural democracy and community-based arts, include culture, art, authenticity and creativity. Humpty Dumpty may have said “When I use a word, it means exactly what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” but we think communication, effectiveness, and collaboration depend on exploring meanings for both differences and points of connection.
What words would like you like explored?
In this discussion Arlene and François draw from the work originated by Raymond Williams n his 1976 book Keywords, which has had many subsequent editions. They also reference New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, and published in 2005; one of several inspired by Williams’ book.