Presentation for International Perspectives on Participation and Engagement in the Arts conference, University of Utrecht, June 2014. Some perspectives and issues arising from the AHRC-funded Connected Communities pilot demonstrator project, Remaking Society. For more details visit http://remaking society.ageofwe.org

1. Remaking Society: realising the potential of cultural
activities in contexts of deprivation
An AHRC Connected Communities ‘pilot
demonstrator’ project
Kerrie Schaefer
University of Exeter
Graham Jeffery
University of the West of Scotland
www.twitter.com/RemakingSociety
remakingsociety.ageofwe.org

2. Remaking Society: Critical Framework
• The project aimed to understand ‘community
arts’ practices beyond dominant discourses, at
least in a cultural policy context, of ‘culture-
led regeneration’ (e.g. Vickery 2007) and
functionally-driven debates about the ‘social
impact of the arts’ (e.g. Matarasso 1997,
Belfiore and Bennett 2008).

3. Long history of community arts …
In 1984, Owen Kelly, one of the founding advocates
for the community arts movement, argued that the
strategic refusal by community artists to articulate a
critical programme, their determination instead to
pragmatically pursue ‘vague’ definitions of
‘community’ in order to secure government funding
of their activities (1984: 22-23), had reduced the
movement to “something with the status of
ameliorative social work for what are pejoratively
called disadvantaged groups” (Watt, 1991: 56).

4. ‘Community’ – problematic concept
In this study we drew on a ‘dynamic’ notion of community, articulated by Prof.
David Watt after the programme for community arts that Kelly went on to
define via the British Socialist critical tradition, and Shelton Trust’s manifesto
on cultural democracy (1986). According to Watt:
“Static notions of community are seen as impositions, usually categorisations,
by a dominant culture concerned to maintain itself as monolithic by
exercising its power to define and subsume subgroups. Dynamic notions of
community … allow the creation of purposive communities of interest which,
by the process of self-definition, resist being thus subsumed and can retain an
oppositional integrity. This autonomy introduces the possibility of internal
negotiation as a basic mode of social interaction, and they are consequently
potentially democratic and alterable. The commitment to democracy as a
principle is then seen as leading to the possibility of broad alliances between
autonomous groups working to undermine the dominant culture through an
insistence on common access to the process of creating meaning and value
within the culture” (1991: 64).

5. Dynamic notion of community
Questioning both re-presentation of
marginalisation + instrumentalisation of arts as
part of (external) intervention to remediate social
deficit (‘arts as social elastoplast’ model – see
White). [‘voluntary participation’]
Community arts practices themselves resist being
subsumed by governmental and market logics.
How they resist while working in partnership with
social/public agencies and corporate entities is of
great interest, and also serves to bring the value
of community arts practices into sharp relief.

6. • Huge policy interest in arts as means of ‘connecting communities’ but all
too often this is reduced to tokenism or worse
• Formed partnership with artsworkers because we wanted to know what
their aims/objectives were, what creative partnerships and assets they
mobilised in working in places of deprivation, not ONLY those of
(cultural/social) commissioning bodies.
• ‘Value’ cannot be reduced to ‘social impact’ or measuring economically
based outcomes since the practices themselves resist being subsumed by
governmental and market logics. How they resist while working in
partnership with social agencies and corporate entities is of great interest,
and also serves to bring the value of community arts practices into sharp
relief. Our focus was more on ‘values’ that underpinned the practice –
rooted in long traditions/histories of community based/participatory
practices – but different from organisation to organisation.
• Partner orgs - NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde, CADISPA Trust, and
www.poverty.ac.uk.

7. Developing an alternative critical
framework
drawing on :
• histories/theories of community arts (see Kelly 1984, Watt 1991,
Kershaw 1992, Fox 2002, Crehan 2011, van Erven 2000, 2013);
• cross-cutting research in creative partnerships, informal
pedagogies and inclusive arts practices (Jeffery 2005 etc.);
• community cultural development in which ‘cultural vitality’ is
posited as a central (fourth) pillar of sustainable (social, economic
and environmental) development (Hawkes 2001) (see also Adams
and Goldbard 2000, 2002, Goldbard 2006);
• assets-based community development (Kretzman and McKnight
1993) (see also Cohen-Cruz 2010)
• arts in health/human flourishing (White 2009).

8. Research/practice partnership
• Researchers partnered with four (4) UK
community-based arts/media projects:
– Theatre Modo (Aberdeenshire)
– Swingbridge Media (Gateshead)
– Lee Ivett (architect) and Nicola Atkinson/NADFLY
(visual artist), Love Milton (Glasgow)
– Bradford Community Broadcasting (Bradford)

9. Theatre Modo –critical case study
• A self-defined ‘social circus’ established in 1995, Theatre Modo works throughout
Scotland from bases in Glasgow and, since 2012, Peterhead utilising “high quality
engagement in circus, street theatre and carnival arts as a catalyst for individual
and community change” (Theatre Modo).
• In 2009, Aberdeenshire Community Planning Partnership invited Modo to
contribute to a ‘Youth Regeneration’/Reaching Out Project in Peterhead and
Fraserburgh, fishing towns located on the north eastern coastline of the region.
• Unbalanced Aberdeenshire economy – boom and bust simultaneously
(http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/jun/18/aberdeen-oil-city-boom-bust-
millionaires-unemployment)
• Oil industry wealth sits alongside economic decline in traditional industries
• Complex picture – pockets of multiple deprivation, EU immigration, drug/alcohol
addiction, ‘affluenza’
• Peterhead and Fraserburgh – young people make up just under 50% of population.
• Since 2009 Modo has produced an annual Fireworks Parade, a large celebratory
community event coinciding with Bonfire Night, in Peterhead (Pandemonium 2009,
Leviathan 2011) and Fraserburgh (Fantasmagoria 2010, Maelstrom 2012).

14. • Workshops in performance, design and making led by Modo practitioner
and ex-participant (AWL).
• Teams of two (progressive route through participation + inclusive practice
at scale)
• Danziger: “we concentrate on low-fi, cheap activities like juggling, stilt-
walking and fire because 2 of us can work with 30 young people at a time.
We don’t do aerial, for instance, because it’s too expensive. We are always
trying to find ways to make sure that our activities are affordable, possible
and inclusive so we don’t have to make choices about who takes part”
(2012).
• 64 weekly workshops in school (curriculum and special ed. classes), youth
and community groups (from scouts to alcohol/drugs recovery) – 1000
participants – 750 in parade – 7-8K watching.
• Community critical concept – dynamically inclusive – work with ALL young
people (not just hard to reach – not a ‘parade of the hoodlums’)

16. • Modo carved out an active creative space – a
‘spatiality of action and performance’ (Rose
1997) – in which young people were occupied
with the disciplines of physical and circus
performance, and the challenge of making a
street parade and spectacular community
event
• Modo practitioners – ‘ownership’; ‘ creative
learning and development’ – task-based
• i.e. deliberately non-discursive, non-
representational practice/process.

18. ‘what people seem to want is the liberty to
demonstrate that joy of doing stuff’ (Danziger
2012).
• Drawing on the work of Berlant, Copjec and Bhabha in and through an extended
discussion of Nancy’s concept of ‘inoperative community’, Rose (1997) asserts that
community arts workers engage in a radical politics that works to destabilise
power/knowledge by uncovering surplus, excess and lack in relation to “the
dominant culture’s discursive myths of identity and community” (Rose 1997: 187).
In other words, the resolute focus by community arts workers on process and
participation, their creation of a non-representational ‘spatiality of action and
performance’, founds a ‘politics of praxis’, which is also a ‘politics of resistance’
(1997). The very existence of a space of creative practice is a threat to the
dominant discursive order. Apparently fixed, stable and secure knowledges,
meanings and values can, potentially, be un-worked and re-worked in and through
participatory creative processes.
• the fireworks parade was driven by an emphasis on action and performance and,
within that, the enactment of emergent identities not necessarily simply tied to
place, family, school, or community, but primarily enacted through the celebratory
display of newly learned creative skills in a performed spectacle.

19. Inoperative/projective community
• holding off closure/singularity/exclusion of one type of community
‘building’ process for process, participation, space for many voices
• Each case study – Modo, Swingbridge and Love Milton worked
within this inoperative (non-functional) framework.
• While Modo is very much situated within practices problematised
as ‘governing by community’ (Rose 1999), we argue that in creating
a ‘spatiality of action and performance’ (Rose 1997), Modo’s
creative practice troubles fixed notions of identity and community
particularly in relation to young people and determinations of social
exclusion. It is within the non-representational space of
performance created by Modo that alternative possibilities, not
necessarily dictated by external intervention, are generated and
enacted.

20. The value of inoperative community?
There is a problem in the range of perceived benefits. A project like this has the potential to have a
massive range of benefits to a massive range of beneficiaries (participants, partners, groups,
professionals, public, the wider community). Some are individually slight but have a cumulative effect,
some are strategic and supported, others are life changing. Some are more guaranteed than others,
some are instant, others much less so. Some are seen very clearly by particular people or partners,
others are much more subtle or hard to spot. To claim or trumpet the full gamut would be ambitious
and deeply hard to prove, as well as possibly unwise.
Added to this is the challenge that in a partnership of this scale there are inevitably differences in
priorities or desired outcomes from one partner to the next, depending on their own values, outcomes
and involvement in the partnership. Negotiating these without allowing the work to become
fragmented is part of the creativity. But it does mean that sometimes the outcomes can only perceived
as part of larger whole. (“to be placed alongside and integrated with a range of other interventions”).
Sometimes other work feeds into the project, other times the benefits of the project can be best
perceived as contributing to a different or bigger picture.
…to state outcomes can actually make it harder to achieve. And to become focussed on delivering
specific outcomes can undermine the process (rather than responding creatively it encourages top
down dictated pathways).
(Martin Danzinger, Artistic Director, Theatre Modo)

21. Love Milton
• Architecture and visual arts in context of Milton –
post-war, north Glasgow housing estate
• How do you design a community centre/space
that will bring people together in
meaningful/productive way?
• marginal/outsider status in Glasgow’s ‘cultural
economy’ – attempting instead to make
meaningful communicative connections through
art and architecture as a medium of social
exchange

26. Swingbridge Media
• Participatory film making through cycle of
economic/industrial decline and regeneration in
NE England. All through that long 30-odd years
Hugh has kept video as space for people to voice
experiences of industrial decline and resultant
poverty AND of arts-led regeneration – which has
NOT remediated poverty – rather again, brings
class divisions into focus
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrBgT51cz18

27. Problems
• Rather than constantly attempting to ‘prove’ impact – better to pay
more attention to the ‘slow and gentle journey(s)’ (Crehan) of these
practices and the conditions and circumstances under which they
are more likely to thrive – need also to situate them historically
• Return to questions of cultural resource, cultural assets.
• Problems of putting positivist, policy-based frameworks in place as
primary means of understanding improvised, social processes –
leads to clash of discourses, clash of values and misunderstandings
about the purpose of such activities.
• Practitioners are used to being ‘chameleonic’ (Rimmer et al, 2014)
but are they/we masking our values in the service of neo-liberal
constructs? Is there a need to return to more explicit
understandings of the politics of community based practice?

28. References
• Adams, D and Goldbard, A. (2000) Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development New York, NY: The Rockefeller Foundation.
• Belfiore, E. and Bennett, O. (2008) The Social Impact of the Arts: an intellectual history, London: Palgrave
• Brown, T, Higham, B and Rimmer M. (2014) Whatever Happened to Community Music? AHRC Research Network Report, Norwich:
University of East Anglia
• Cohen-Cruz, J. (2010) Engaging Performance: Theatre as call and response, London: Routledge
• Crehan, K. (2011) Community Art: An Anthropological Perspective. London and New York: Berg.
• Erven, E.A.P.B. van (2000) Community Theatre: Global Perspectives, London: Routledge
• Erven, E.A.P.B. van (2013). Community Arts Dialogues. Utrecht: Treaty of Utrecht
• Fox, J. (2002) Eyes on Stalks, London: Methuen
• Goldbard, A. (2006): New Creative Community: the art of cultural development, New York: New Village Press
• Hawkes, J. (2001) The Fourth Pillar of Sustainability: Culture’s Essential role in Public Planning. Melbourne: Common Ground/The
Cultural Development Network (Vic).
• Jeffery, G. (ed) (2005) The Creative College: building a successful learning culture in the arts, Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books
• Kelly, O. (1984) Community, Art, and the State: Storming the Citadels. London: Comedia
• Kershaw, B (1992,) The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention, London: Routledge
• Kretzmann. J and McKnight, J (1993) Building Communities from the Inside Out: a path towards finding and mobilizing a community’s
assets, Evanston, ABCD Institute
• Matarasso, F. (1997) Use of Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts, Stroud: Comedia
• Rose, G. (1997) “Performing inoperative community. The space and the resistance of some community arts projects” in Pile and Keith
(Eds.) Geographies of Resistance London: Routledge
• Vickery, J. (2007) The emergence of culture-led regeneration: a policy concept and its discontents, Working Paper. Coventry: University
of Warwick. Centre for Cultural Policy Studies. (Research papers).
• Watt, D. (1991) “Interrogating ‘Community’: Social Welfare versus Cultural Democracy”, in Binns, V. (ed.) Community and the Arts:
History, Theory, Practice, London: Pluto Press
• White, M. (2009) Arts Development in Community Health: a social tonic, Milton Keynes: Radcliffe Publishing