Audience Development & Cultural Democracy

In the sixth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso interview Jade Campbell and Erin Walcon of Doorstep Arts in Torbay, England. They talk about running 14 different drama groups in youth clubs, church halls, and schools; setting up Doorstop with a consciously feminist and flexible model; what it means to “co-parent” the work; engaging the hard questions in ways that respect children’s intelligence; and much more!

For the last year Owen Kelly has worked with a group of educators from across the Nordic and Baltic regions to develop the VAKEN project. This has begun developing a rapid learning process to enable students (and later others) to improve their soft skills.
The process has raised a number of interesting and difficult questions starting with “how do we define soft skills?” On the one hand they can easily seem to mean whatever you want them to mean. On the other hand it remains far from clear whose benefit they serve. Should we see them as sets of behaviours the employers increasingly demand from job applicants, or should we see them as aspects of self-development and well-being that everyone should have access to?
In this episode Owen Kelly pursues a genuine inquiry into what we might mean by soft skills, and why we might find ourselves concerned with them.

Sophie Hope and Henry Mulhall have begun work on a project within a project. They have begun creating an evaluation framework for a European Union funded project called Beyond Participation - a title that has got neatly truncated to Be Part.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks to them about this. He wants to know what the Be Part project aims to do, and how it aims to do it. He also wants to know how Sophie and Henry intend to carry out their evaluation.
Both lines of inquiry prove harder and more interesting than you might expect.

Icelandic culture offers many surprises for an alert visitor: not least in the sheer amount and quality of it.
In this episode Owen Kelly talks with Hafdís Björg Hjálmarsdóttir and Vera K Vestmann Kristjánsdóttir from the School of Business and Science at the University of Akureyri, a city of approximately 20,000 people in the north of Iceland.
They talk about the by-now unique naming convention in Iceland and how it acts as an example of cultural continuity. Akureyri houses a professional theatre, a professional symphony orchestra, and a very active cultural centre. They move on to discuss the reasons for the Icelandic investment in culture, and the participatory nature of cultural activities.
Vera and Hafdís explain how books still form an important part of the fabric of Icelandic life and an essential part of Christmas celebrations.
The web page for this episode at https://miaaw.net contains numerous links to explanatory articles and examples of the nature of cultural funding in Iceland.

In the fifth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso interview Denise Griffin Johnson, a cultural organizer in West Baltimore on the east coast of the U.S. She talks about racial justice, building on community strengths instead of deficits, the “highway to nowhere” and more.
Denise Griffin Johnson is the director of the Arch Social Community Network in West Baltimore, a community-led cultural organizing network founded in 2015 and based at the historic Arch Social Club. Denise has decades of experience as an organizer and advocate in Baltimore, during which she has held many positions in government and nonprofit organizations and served on numerous boards and advisory groups.
She is a co-founder of CultureWorks Baltimore, a member of the national network Alternate ROOTS, and a Cultural Agent with the US Department of Arts and Culture (a non-government entity).
In 2011-2013 Denise collaborated with Alternate ROOTS and Roadside Theater to produce a cultural festival that drew an audience of 11,000, and in 2015 she collaborated with the higher education consortium Imagining America to produce a national conference and cultural organizing institute in Baltimore.
Denise is a graduate of Coppin State University, with an MS in Family Counseling.

This episode continues a trilogy of audio essays concerned with the work of Marshall McLuhan and its continuing relevance in the digital age. In this episode Owen Kelly looks at what McLuhan means by “the electric age”.
He starts at the beginning, with the introduction of street lighting in Wabash Indiana, and then looks at some illustrative examples from the invention of celebrity to the introduction of the Walkman and the arrival of the computer gaming industry. He concludes by asking which came first: the desire to publicise your sex life or the invention of the home video camera.
This builds upon McLuhan’s key concepts, outlined in the first episode, and sets the stage for the final episode which will examine the internet and world wide web from a McLuhanesque perspective, and discuss the role of “art” in a digital world.

In this episode Owen Kelly sits back while Sophie Hope shares some of her thoughts on participation and democracy.
She gives examples, some personal, of the ways in which participation can extend over time as well as space. She talks about the Joseph Beuys seminal work 7000 Acorns, and its afterlife as an inspiration to other participatory projects, some involving acorns and oaks.
Sophie draws inspiration from a series of articles and papers that are listed on the miaaw.net website and cover topics from policy making and gender politics to cultural policy in Chile and South Africa.

Most months have four Fridays, and we know what to do with them. We put out a podcast: a different but related one for each Friday in the month.
Sometimes, however, a month has five fridays, and then we have to think again. We put out an episode of our occasional series, designed for just this purpose. This, then, is the first episode of Friday Number Five.
Owen Kelly looks at (and listens to) the very first sound recordings ever made and then asks how they turned into public radio, and what we might consider the funniest radio sketch of all time.
We then find out what all this has to do with cultural democracy.