Presentation by Paul Long of Birmingham City University to the Cultural Intermediation Project Continuity Day, 27 September 2013

1. COMMUNITIES
Communities, Culture and
Creative Economies

2. WP1 Valuation
Lead: Dave O’Brien
Additional input: Lisa de Propris
Critical Friend: Andrew Dubber
WP6 CIRCUS
WP2 Historic
Lead: Ian Grosvenor
RF: Natasha McNabb
Critical Friend: Beth Perry
WP3 Governance
Lead: Beth Perry
RF: Site Researcher x2
Additional Input:
Antonia Layard
Critical Friend: Dave O’Brien
WP4 Communities
Lead: Paul Long
Additional input
Manchester case study: tbc
RF: Site Researcher x 2
Critical Friend: Phil Jones
WP5 Interventions
Lead: Phil Jones
Additional input
Manchester case study: Paul
Heywood
Additional input
Birmingham case study:
Andrew Dubber
RF: Site researcher x 2
Critical Friend: Kerry Wilson
Seminar Series
Lead: Kerry Wilson
Reflection
Lead: Tim May
New Media
Lead: Richard Clay
Site Coordination
Manchester: Beth Perry
Birmingham: Phil Jones
1x PhD
Intellectual Property
Supervisor: Antonia Layard
1x PhD
Universities as
Intermediaries
Supervisor: Tim May
WP0 Scoping & Theory Building
Lead: Phil Jones
Additional Input: Research team
Figure 1: Work package structure

3. Aims
• To explore how intermediation connects
communities into the creative economy .
• To explore how these insights can be
enhanced to break down the tension
between hard-to-reach communities and
inaccessible cultural resources.
• To develop means to measure value of
intermediation activities within targeted
communities.

4. How does this element of the
project contribute to the aims of the
project as a whole?
• Case studies to emerge from work
undertaken in WP1 and 3 in order to
connect what different institutions think is
happening to how intermediation activity is
experienced on the ground.

5. Research questions
• How do cultural intermediations impact upon
communities (how is community conceptualised in
intermediation)?
• In this context, what is cultural learning? How are
memories, behaviour, skills, values or knowledge
developed?
• What ‘good’ is cultural intermediation?
• How have formal processes of cultural intermediation
engaged with different communities, particularly those
that have been ‘hard-to-reach’?
• To what extent have activities served to facilitate the
connection of these communities into the creative
economy?

6. Big City Culture 2010-2015 - A Cultural
Strategy for Birmingham
• Participation in culture is inherently a good thing – it
challenges perceptions, prompts feelings of
happiness, sadness, anger and excitement, creates
moments of personal reflection and enables people to
understand the world they live in, its possibilities and the
cultures of others more profoundly. Cultural activities
encourage self and group expression and provoke reactions
at an emotional, spiritual and intellectual level, improving
the quality of life in the city and a sense of identity and
belonging. Cultural activities can also deliver a range of
other outcomes including health and wellbeing, social and
community cohesion, civic engagement, economic
impact, development of transferable skills and improved
environment.

7. Methods
• Ethnography
• Deployment of shadowing activities
– ~80 walked and conventional
interviews, focus groups and participatory
events
• Gathering ‘fruits’ of intermediation -----*

8. How does this WP engage with
communities?
• Engaging community researchers attempts to
break down the boundaries between academic
and lay knowledge creation = co-constructors of
knowledge.
• Training community researchers to examine the
ways in which cultural intermediation has
impacted on their lives.
• Producing benefit in terms of
upskilling, confidence building and direct
engagement in developing new modes of working
to improve community engagement in these
activities.

9. Numbers
• Commences January 2014
• Recruitment: 60 people across 2 sites to train
as community researchers (ref:
commitment, compromises)
• 10 to continue as WP5 evaluators
• 6 on panels for commissioning process.

10. Places
• Birmingham: Balsall Heath
• Salford: Ordsall/Hulme
• Narratives – spaces of cultural
intermediation/settlement/legacy (cultural
memory?)
• Objects of ‘study’, regeneration etc.
• Contexts: cultural intermediation and
austerity – assets (investment /stripped;
physical and human)

11. Issues
• Rationale for sites and connectivity of governance
issues/case-studies
• Comparisons (reference points beyond selected sites)
, leakage and mobility
• ‘Community’ (lived culture)
• Researchers: who, why, what?
(Rewards, investment, confidence, competence, reach, ‘inn
ocence’ and integrity: ‘work load’)
• Participation mirror and object/subject issue (CI
homologies, partnerships & affect)
• ‘Revisiting’ frameworks of evaluation (and community
research)
• Results and risk