Creative Citizens on the move

We have now recovered from the excitement of our sell-out Creative Citizens conference and exhibition at the Royal College of Art in September 2014.

We had great keynotes from our guests – Geoff Mulgan, CEO of Nesta; Paola Antonelli of New York’s Museum of Modern Art; and Jean Burgess from Queensland University of Technology. We also enjoyed a revealing debate with leaders from four of London’s political think tanks, arising from a provocation paper by Stephen Lee of Centre Forum.

A sell-out gathering crunched its way through a great diversity of workshops and seminars, which we’ve briefly summarised to give you the flavour.

A highlight of the exhibition was the Creative Citizen Gallery (available online soon), which brings together portraits of some of the favourite people we have worked with during this project.

Our News Café delivered on the spot interviews, as well as an opportunity to talk with colleagues from the Cardiff Centre for Community Journalism.

Our opening shot at gathering together findings from our three strands of work – hyperlocal news; community-based planning and design and creative networks was also published in time for the conference. It is called First Findings.

We are now hard at work on our book: The Creative Citizen Unbound, which Policy Press are due to publish in 2016.  This will be the place where we shape the thinking and the insights which have emerged from the 30 months we have worked together as part of the Connected Communities programme of the AHRC and other funding councils.

The writing team for the book includes everyone who has worked on Media, Community and the Creative Citizens. The co-editors are Ian Hargreaves and John Hartley, two professors who had a go at stitching their own biographies to the idea of creative citizenship in a stand-up double act at the conference.

There is also lots of other publishing going on within each of our research strands.  Cultural Science, an open access, online journal, will publish a special issue on Creative Citizenship before the end of 2014.

This project’s funding ends in November 2014, but our formal completion point is February 2015.  We are pursuing a number of ideas to build upon the idea of the creative citizen – so please stay in touch (Facebook, Twitter).