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Cultural intermediation & the creative economy

Cultural intermediation & the creative economy

Tag Archives: Community

Co-operatives and the Cultural Industries

13 Monday Apr 2015

Posted by surflaura in Uncategorized

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Art, Community, Creative economies, formal governance, jobs

Co-operatives and the Cultural Industries was a round-table discussion organised on 1st of April 2015 by Marisol Sandoval and Jo Littler at Creative Industries Department, City University, London. Four speakers had roughly 20 minutes each to talk about co-ops, followed by time for questions, comments and discussions.

To set the scene for this discussion, it is important to consider the following:

Around 50,000 design and creative arts graduates come onto the labour market each year. They face entering the workforce as part of the new precariat, what Guy Standing has labelled the ‘New Dangerous Class’, which means they are likely to be “relegated to a bits-and-pieces life, in and out of casual flexible jobs, without being able to build an occupational career or identity” (Standing 2011).

The four speakers had very different experiences of co-operation as a business practice, but their presentations addressed these problems:

1) Unpaid work and internships are endemic, even axiomatic, in creative and cultural sectors and permanent jobs are hard to come by.
2) Although ‘entrepreneurship’ and business skills are taught as part of creative arts degrees as a matter of course, the co-operative model of business organisation is often marginalised as an option.

This event was convened by two senior lecturers to encourage a discussion of the potentials and limits of worker co-operatives as a way of organizing cultural work, but I went because I have a personal interest in these issues too: when two friends and I started a small clubwear business after graduating in the late 1990s we had a number of problems, but being a worker’s co-operative wasn’t one of them. The solidarity, sense of common purpose or what one speaker here described as ‘sweat equity’ (working your equal share despite not getting paid) that united us in a brave attempt to create and manage our own experience of working for a living was readily cemented by a legal and ethical contract, the common ownership worker’s co-operative business model, that made sense of our shared ambitions and more importantly, shared risk. There are some ideas here that could also be applicable to the kinds of grassroots projects and community organisations currently involved in Connected Communities research.

Economist Robin Murray started by explaining the economic context in which co-ops assert their difference from other forms of production within organised capitalism. He has been Director of Industry at the Greater London Council in the 1980s, and a Fellow of the Institute of Development Studies, so he knows a thing or two about the world of macro-business. He used a flipchart to explain how when production became more complex and specialised, the necessary socialisation of its workforce increased, which was how Marx understood the development of industrial capitalism. Robin then introduced the Dunbar model for the number of stable relationships that humans can comfortably maintain, which is no more than 150, making the point that labour organises itself more easily in non-complex activities. In Robin’s opinion, the Dunbar model limits a co-ops’ ability to manage really complex business operations and so capitalism became the default format as a system for organisation for mega-business, especially in our highly specialised late-modern economy in the UK. Capitalists have the ability to manage the co-ordination of complexity and combine it with hierarchical socialisation, making them able to operate effectively at economies of scale.

The first great wave of worker co-ops in the mid to late 19th century followed the Rochdale pioneers’ example, which was a model for how the proletariat could react to the development of national industrial capitalism and build resilience by organising purchasing and retail operations in small groups. He calls it “consumer co-operation of the industrial working class” (Murray 2012), they were, after all, the dispossessed workers of their age. It led to the formation of hundreds of retail co-ops, a wholesale society, factories, farms, shipping lines, insurance and banks that, if taken as a single network, was at the time the largest corporate organisation in the world. What Robin suggests that co-ops can do to take back ownership of complex economic processes or to form businesses that need to operate at a larger scale is to combine separate co-operative ‘Dunbar cells’, as the first UK Co-op movement did, to become a huge cell network.

Rhiannon Colvin founded co-operative advocacy organisation AltGen to support 18-29 year olds to set up workers co-operatives. Rhiannon says she founded AltGen after applying for endless graduate jobs and unpaid internships herself without success and decided that young people could create something better if they started working together. She decided to reverse the blame for her own struggle to find work and wanted to help other young people understand that that the problem is not them, it is the economy. They are inheriting an economic reality in which they have no control over their time, no economic security, are forced into accepting low-income, poor quality and temporary jobs and are unable to accumulate any kind of capital at all. AltGen aims to help them find ways into a sustainable working future and contribute to a more stable economy through co-operation. “We need to stop fighting each other for work, especially unpaid work” she said. Putting together minds and skills to empower young graduates to take control of their own employment, AltGen can help them to understand and solve the employment crisis they face. The organisation is now looking into setting up a freelancers’ co-operative. Being employed brings rights that self-employed people don’t have, like holiday and sick pay, protection against discrimination and unfair dismissal, redundancy pay and trade unions. This next action will try and find ways to ameliorate an isolating situation that makes self-employed people more vulnerable to being treated as a disposable workforce.

Printer and pro-co-op activist Siôn Whellens shared his own story, which in some ways was similar to Rhiannon’s. He trained as a printer but the recession in 1981 made finding a ‘proper’ job impossible. Living in London, he joined a community press organisation and started from there instead. He is now a member of Calverts, a communications design and printing co-operative, based in Bethnal Green. Founded in 1977, it is a worker co-operative with 12 members that can produce all manner of printed items from leaflets and menus to art books and multimedia products, it also creates websites and develops all kinds of interesting communication projects. Under ‘environmental initiatives’ their website mentions the company’s commitment to utilising the latest technology that reduces their impact on the environment in many ways, such as computer-to-plate technology which dispenses with film, as well as the obvious choices such as vegetable oil based inks. Siôn is also a business advisor at institutions including City University, where he advises on the nature and benefits of co-operative approaches to work and creative life. He has written about the precarious generation of creative workers on his blog suggesting that as the cultural sector has grown “workers have responded by developing agile, collaborative and creative approaches not just to work, but to the necessities of life including accommodation, leisure and social support”. He writes that despite “the primacy of individual genius and effort” that go with the territory of the creative industries and its rhetoric, collaborative practice is something that is “familiar and normal for many students and graduates”.

Tara Mulqueen is a PhD student in the Law Department at Birkbeck, University of London and her dissertation title is presently ‘Co-operation and Social economy in Critical perspective: History, Politics and Law’. Tara also has direct experience of being part of a co-operative as she worked at the community owned and volunteer run People’s Supermarket in central London, famously used by David Cameron to make a ‘Big Society’ speech in 2011.

She is interrogating the tensions or even conflicting aims of co-operative businesses to understand the difficulties of balancing social transformation with commercial sustainability, to consider whether becoming a market entity has a depoliticising effect on their practice and to locate them within the broader history of working class movements. Law is a “key terrain” (Mulqueen 2012) in which social groups and corporate bodies are defined. Co-operatives as corporate entities were brought within the state and its legal framework when they were formally recognised as a legitimate form of business in 1852. At this time joint-stock companies, trusts and friendly societies were already in use, now a number of different legal forms could also be co-operatives. It is a ‘protected category’ in law, which means that in theory, a capitalist business cannot use the word co-operative, but in practice it is the Government’s business secretary that has the final decision on this. One thing a co-op can never be is a charity, in fact it is the opposite of a charity. Trustees may not benefit from a charity. The market has therefore become the very terrain of a co-operative’s existence in which it is possibleto see them as a category of middle-class reformism, they are also limited by their recognition by the state, something that the trade unions resisted to preserve greater freedom of organisation. It is interesting that Tara’s own experiences of self-organised and ethical work included unintentionally becoming entangled with the state idea of a Big Society, a “dubious program” (Mulqueen 2012) to expand the voluntary sector as an alternative to state-funded services. Dilemmas over principles will continue to trouble the development of a social economy – one important question being is it acceptable to survive and prosper? Community groups and budding partnerships interested in producing and selling goods need to ask themselves this question. If they are considering adopting a co-operative model, would ‘business’ as the legal form of association actually obscure their political project and social goals? Or alternatively does the co-operative model limit their ability to operate within the mainstream economy?

In my experience, the common ownership worker’s co-operative model was, of the four options listed in the Princes Trust ‘starting a business’ guide, by far the most logical choice for us as a group of friends, yet being involved in conversations about the values of co-operative business did, over time, have the effect of making our business into an ethical and political concern. Becoming a co-op inadvertently developed and promoted a political project that I hadn’t understood would be an effect of running a business and started a chain of events which has ultimately brought me here – to the Cultural Intermediation project and the Centre for Sustainable and Regional Futures (SURF).

Refs:
Mulqueen, T. 2012. When a business isn’t a business: law and the political in the history of the United Kingdom’s co-operative movement
Murray, R. 2012. A different way of doing things.
Standing, G. 2011. Stirrings of the New Dangerous Class

Follow the speakers on Twitter:
@AltGen101
@Scumboni
@tara_mulqueen

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Birmingham Surrealist Laboratory

06 Monday Jan 2014

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Balsall Heath, Birmingham, Community, Creativity, Cultural Intermediation, Culture, Surrealism

Good news. Just before Christmas, I found out we had successfully been awarded a bid, titled ‘The Birmingham Surrealist Laboratory’ (with Dr Stephen Forcer, Modern Languages, University of Birmingham). Funded by the Communities and Culture Network+, the project builds out of our ongoing Cultural Intermediation work. It represents the first stage of a feasibility study for a heritage space dedicated to the Birmingham Surrealist Movement (1930s-1950s). The seed-funded experimental project aims to investigate the ways in which new digital facilities can help unlock complex issues of cultural heritage and cultural sensitivity in a diverse city. It was inspired by a recent Surrealist House competition staged as part of an art programme for residents in the area of Balsall Heath, south Birmingham (Balsall Heath Biennale 2013; http://www.balsallheathbiennale.com/decorate-your-house-competition).Of particular interest to the project is that Balsall Heath was home to the Birmingham Surrealist Group (Levy 2003; Sidey 2000; Remy 2000), and, indeed, the locale for British Surrealism nationally over the 1940s and 1950s, given Conroy Maddox’s role as a champion of ‘orthodox’ Surrealism (Levy 2003). The Birmingham Group comprised Maddox, Desmond Morris, John Melville and Emmy Bridgwater, and was at the centre of a community of alternative cultural figures including jazz musician George Melly, writers Stuart Gilbert and Henry Green, and poet Henry Reed.

Today, Balsall Heath has been identified as falling within the lowest 5% of neighbourhoods – referred to nationally as ‘Super Output Areas’ – for multiple deprivations (Census 2011). A low take-up from the established, predominantly Pakistani Muslim population in the Surrealist House competition offers productive ground for working through how digital technologies can be used to investigate multiple barriers to mainstream, and more subversive, manifestations of culture and heritage in the city. The project comprises two digital workshops in the Digital Heritage Hub, University of Birmingham, and a roundtable with surrealist experts and community leaders. It also neatly dovetails with the Cultural Intermediation research which will be focusing on communities and the creative economy in Balsall Heath this calendar year.

Posted by saskiawarren | Filed under Appointments, Conference, Exhibitions, Uncategorized

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Imagining Possibilities Conference

04 Monday Mar 2013

Posted by saskiawarren in Conference, Exhibitions

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Community, Creative, Participatory, Policy, Remaking, Society, Well-being

Creative Futures Institute, University of West Scotland, Paisley, 1 March 2013

I haven’t checked in for a while however the project has continued to move at a pace. On Friday I attended a conference exploring the findings of Remaking Society, an AHRC Connected Communities ‘Pilot Demonstrator’ project. Both inspirational and instructive by turns, through a series of presentations and workshops involving health policy makers, cultural programmers, artists and academics the day explored the connection between participation in cultural production, well-being and community-making. Taking the argument that community has been ‘demolished’ as a concept in part due to how it is mobilised to designate the insider/outside, Kerrie Schaefer, co-investigator of Remaking Society, instead considered community-in-flux, as dynamic and shifting, or being with others. Ethics in participatory practice were a key point of debate with the ever pertinent issue of power-relations between researcher/practitioner and participant communities. Here, the claims of participatory practice came under the critical lens: Are participants given real power? Or is the power illusory and fleeting? How can excellent quality work and participatory politics work together? Can product and process play an equal role? Above all, why do we expect certain communities to undergo a transformative process in their lives, yet our lives don’t need changing?

François Matarasso, in his key note speech, gave six best practice points which will inform our work going ahead:

1. The importance of stating clear aims and objectives between researcher and participants.

2. Must obtain consent from participants that their lives will be transformed.

3. Needs of communities are best identified by communities themselves.

4. In partnerships must share common goals (but not necessarily all goals).

5. Communities have to decide themselves if these common goals are met.

6. Art may not be the best way of reaching common goals.

In particular, exemplary work was shown by the Educational Shakespeare Company (ESC), Belfast, on healing trauma through film. Their current landmark project is called Second Chance for Change: Including the Excluded which works with a group of Community and Forensic Mental Health (CFMH) service users at Holywell Hospital in Northern Ireland. Theatre Modo working in Fraserburgh, Odd Numbers project in Milton, North Glasgow, and Swingbridge Media, North Tyneside, were also highly impressive, deserving greater recognition and continued funding.

Exhibitioning cultures

12 Monday Nov 2012

Posted by saskiawarren in Exhibitions

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Art, Birmingham, Community, Creative economies, Culture, Engagement, Envision, Intermediation, Project Pigeon, The Drum

It’s been a packed past week visiting organisations and exhibitions, learning more about what work is being done with communities in Birmingham. Beyond the large higher-profile institutions of the city centre (IKON’s Autumn Almanac; BMAG’s new interactive History Galleries), I’ve been off to:

Aston (The Drum; Envision programme launch at Aston Villa Football Club);

Perry Bar (Birmingham City University, with a presentation from Project Pigeon);

Balsall Heath (Ort’s first birthday at Old Print Works);

…And also to Manchester to see research-through-exhibition-making (Sustainable Stories, the CUBE). The Mistra – Urban Futures and SURF Centre / University of Salford exhibition mobilised community researchers to help map the stories of residents in Greater Manchester around the theme of Sustainability in cities. These researchers were also active in the space of the exhibition documenting the stories of visitors and embodying the project’s partnership between grass-roots localism and academia.

Back talking about Birmingham, I wanted to pick up on just a couple of the brilliant intermediary activities happening here:

Meeting with Jonathan Morley from The Drum gave great insights into arts programming in the cultural landscape beyond the city centre. Originally set up with assistance from Probation Services and awarded core funding from the Arts Council and the City Council for the past decade, The Drum acts as a cultural intermediary fostering a sense of place and place-making in the local area of Aston; however for future sustainability it must also attract those audiences who attend city-centre events. With a remit to represent South Asian and Black arts, The Drum needs to connect with local communities and wider communities; to meet commercial targets and deliver artist development aims with a cutting-edge program.  Examples of impressive work with and within communities include Simmer Down Festival (reaching over 8,000 revellers) and the Arts Champion Scheme. The Drum also runs Birmingham’s annual Black History Month in partnership with Birmingham City Council.

Divergently, Project Pigeon revealed more-than-human geographies of cultural intermediation. The arts organisation run by Alexandra Lockett maintains a pigeon loft in Digbeth with 50 birds. Starting with allotments as a form of curating culture, Alexandra’s practice evolved to working with pigeons and pigeon-fanciers using all kinds of platforms and artistic mediums (pigeon stamps and syndicates, writing classes, performances, plays, exhibitions, oral histories). In her talk at BCU, Alexandra documented the under-represented world of pigeon-fancying in Birmingham, drawing its inter-cultural, cross-generational relations. Brummie pigeon fanciers from Chinese communities were shown alongside the white male fancier that has typified representations of the sub-culture. Through funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Project Pigeon Achive is in the process of being developed and will be integrated into the Birmingham Library Archive in Autumn 2013.

Recent Posts

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