Community Cultural Development in Australia

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.

In this episode Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss G.D.H. Cole’s book Guild Socialism Restated, published in 1920, and ask what relevance guild socialism might have to debates about cultural democracy today.

François Matarasso has just published a new book called A Restless Art, which looks at the growth of participatory arts and how it relates to community art and the idea of cultural democracy. This episode continues his conversation with Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope. They look at how participatory art sometimes has cultural democracy as its aim, and ask what cultural democracy might mean in this context.

François Matarasso first worked as a community artist in 1981. Since then he has worked in community arts, participatory arts, and as a writer and researcher. He has just published a new book called A Restless Art, which looks at the growth of participatory arts and argues that it has succeeded in moving cultural discussions forward. In this episode he talks with Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope about the history of participatory art, and the kinds of things that have inspired him.

This episode follows on from Episode 4 which looked at a kind of pre-history of cultural democracy, and Episode 6 which discussed the relationship between the community art movement in the 1980s and cultural democracy. In this episode Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly continue their discussion by focusing on the resurgence of interest in ideas of cultural democracy in the 1990s and 2000s, and the relationships between these and previous ideas.

In February 2019 the report of the Cultural Cities Enquiry appeared, published by a consortium of Core Cities, Key Cities, consultants and arts funding agencies in the UK. Sophie Hope, Owen Kelly & Stephen Pritchard sat down to discuss what the report says and doesn’t say; and the ways in which it does and doesn’t say these things.