DAY TWO PROGRAMME: FRIDAY 19th SEPTEMBER 2014
A one-page ‘At A Glance’ version of the programme is here - a longer programme of the two days can be downloaded here, with full abstracts.
09.15 – 10.15: KEYNOTE IV: JEAN BURGESS – CREATIVE CITZENSHIP AND SOCIAL MEDIA
How have the potentials, practices and platforms for Creative Citizenship changed over the past decade as social media have evolved ? What kinds of affordances either open up or close down the potential for citizens to engage with one another? These questions will be addressed within the context of everyday acts of creativity and communication and the changing social media platforms that support them.
Jean Burgess, Queensland University of Technology, was one of the first researchers to focus on everyday creativity and the internet. Jean was the co-author of the groundbreaking book YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, among others, and most recently co-edited the international collection Twitter and Society. Her current work focuses on the role of social media in everyday politics and practices, and developing new methods for studying the ‘big data’ produced by social media platforms.
10.30 – 12.00: PANEL 7: CREATIVE CITIZENS CRITIQUE
Creativity, participation and co-creation in new media: a comparative analysis on participatory practices
Gemma San Cornelio, Elisenda Ardèvol, Antoni Roig, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
Creative Citizenship in the Margins
Mark Rimmer, Sanna Inthorn & John Street, University of East Anglia
Obstacles to Creative Citizenship
James Miller, Hampshire College
Definition of, and critical perspectives on, creative citizenship
Professor Steve Swindells University of Huddersfield & Dr. Anna Powell University, Huddersfield
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10.30 – 12.00: PANEL 8: INVITED PANEL: TEENAGE KICKS? CREATIVITY, YOUTH AND CITIZENSHIP
Chair: Keri Facer, University of Bristol
What forms of creative citizenship are being presented to young people in schools? How are young people themselves using creative practice as a form of citizenship? How are young people constructing their own ideas of the creative citizen? How does creative practice enhance and mediate youth ‘voice’ as citizens? These issues will be addressed in the proposed symposium that brings together researchers from the UK and Oslo to report on a methodologically diverse set of research projects in this field. The symposium brings together projects funded under the AHRC Cultural Value and Connected Communities programmes to explore the forms of creative citizenship that young people are developing and encountering today. The symposium will comprise 4 papers that report findings but also raise challenging questions to prompt active involvement of the audience in the discussions.
The Making of a Filmmaker: creativity and learning in Early Careers
Dr Øystein Gilje, Faculty of Education, University of Oslo
Young people, creativity and citizenship: evidence from the Creative Partnerships archive
Professor Pat Thomson, The University of Nottingham
Teenage Kicks? Exploring cultural value and creative citizenship from a youth perspective
Dr Helen Manchester & Dr Emma Pett, University of Bristol
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10.30 – 12.00: FINDINGS 3: CREATIVE NETWORKS
Caroline Chapain, Tamara West, (University of Birmingham), Jon Dovey, Shawn Sobers, Emma Agusita (University of the West of England, Bristol) with their community partners The Moseley Community Development Trust and South Blessed
This session shares the work of the Creative Citizens strand that set out to investigate the impact of informal creative networks on their communities. In Bristol we worked with the network of young people that work around the very informal South Blessed social media platform; in Birmingham the team worked with the Moseley Community Development Trust, a charity organisation which aims to encourage creative business to locate in Moseley through a coworking space, the Moseley Exchange, as well as to support the wider social and environmental development of Moseley as a neighbourhood by enabling its community creative and civic actions. The results of the work identified a wide range of citizenship benefits arising from different kinds of creative entrepreneurship. These include both individual and community transformative outcomes as well as training for creative economy work; informal education; sources of alternative information and community cohesion. However the research also highlighted the ways that the digital framing of creative citizenship can produce exclusion and reminded us of the importance of face-to-face and everyday physical interactions to foster social capital and creative actions. We also developed a range of ways of understanding the importance of place, and material production as a way of producing cohesion and impact.
12.00 – 13.00: Lunch
13.00 – 14.00: KEYNOTE VI: JOHN HARTLEY v. IAN HARGREAVES John Hartley is Professor of Cultural Science and Director of the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University (Perth, Western Australia). John HAS published over 200 articles and 24 books in the field of Media & Cultural Studies, he has an incisive and original interest in the digital and public cultures.
Ian Hargreaves holds The Chair of Digital Economy at the University of Cardiff.
Professor Hargreaves’s interests include the impact of digital communications technology on: journalism, media, intellectual property issues and the creative economy.
In 2010/2011, he led a review of intellectual property for the UK Government, published in May 2011 as Digital Opportunity: a review of intellectual property and economic growth. He is also the co-author of the Nesta Manifesto for the Creative Economy (2013).
This double handed keynote will place Creative Citizenship into the wider policy landscape as well as offering a new account of citizenship. ‘Creative Citizenship,’ speaks to the opportunity for ‘user generated politics’ and, correspondingly, ‘usergenerated civics.’ Creative acts of citizenship, we argue, are those which bring originality to acts aimed at civic well-being. In a world of social media, we agree that the collaborative potential of citizens is potentially enhanced in numerous ways, though we also seek to understand the negative tensions involved with these communications technologies. We see creative citizenship as the statistically unquantified base of the ‘creative economy’, an increasingly recognised entity, argued to account for 2.5 million jobs in the UK and around 10 per cent of the economy’s gross value added (Bakhshi et al 2013). The presentation explores the nature and value of creative citizenship and goes to the heart of the contemporary struggle to re-make democratic institutions and procedures in an age of ‘monitory democracy’ (Keane 2009), taking full advantage of the ‘super-abundance’ of digital social media, whilst also recognising and managing the civic limitations of these communications technologies at a time when conventional, mainstream politics (as represented for example in membership of political parties) appears to be in sustained decline. Our focus is on what we argue is the newly emergent form of DIY/DIWO citizenship that builds on earlier models of civic, political, social and cultural forms of citizenship. Do It Yourself Citizenship is based in micro acts of creativity often built through social media, where rights are enacted through choice-based affiliation and self-organised associations. (Potts et al 2008; Bollier 2008 Benkler 2006).
14.00 – 15.00: PANEL 9 : REPRESENTATION AND CITIZENSHIP
The effectiveness of the Shoot To Live community media initiative in addressing the needs of the at-risk youth in Trinidad and Tobago
Rachel-Ann Charles, Birmingham City University
‘Creative’ challenges and in/visible communities: the issue of housing
Ysabel Gerrard, Edgar Gomez Cruz, Helen Thornham, University of Leeds
What will we do when we get there? The politics and practice of public broadcast archive release
Joe Smith, The Open University
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14.00 – 15.00: WORKSHOP 2: CULTURAL VALUE AND ENGAGED CITIZENSHIP
This session will create a dialogue between the AHRC’s Cultural Value Project and the Creative Citizens findings. Understanding the value of culture and of creativity has been a long standing issue for researchers, artists and activists. However, many debates about cultural value have tended to focus on the auxiliary effects of cultural activities defined in terms of policy indicators such as: economic impact; improved educational attainment; better health; reduced unemployment; etc. These approaches often expressed the values of cultural engagement as values accruing to consumers rather than as values co-produced and shaped by citizens. This workshop will introduce some of the new ways of articulating cultural value produced by recent research in relation to as the effect of arts and culture on engaged citizenship.
The AHRC Cultural Value Project is a research initiative set up by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the autumn of 2012 whose objective is to establish a framework that will advance the way in which we understand and define the value of cultural engagement and the methods by which we evaluate that value.
Presentation from 50 Creative Audiences: Analogue Citizens In A Network Culture
Professor Andrew Dewdney and Dr. Victoria Walsh, London South Bank University and Dr Eleonora Belfiore, University of Warwick
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14.00 – 15.00: WORKSHOP 3: THE GLOBAL CREATIVE CITIZEN
Globalisation creates all kinds of contradictions for the practices of citizenship, rooted as they are in various regional, local or even subcultural formations of state, community, and identity. Social media make particularly visible the potential of the internet to support and shape various forms of creative citizenship, and to mobilize networked publics. From petitioning to fundraising and witnessing on platforms like Ushahidi, our micro acts of creative engagement can be aggregated into global impacts. The session will start with a presentation by Joe F. Khalil, (Northwestern University) ‘The Making and Unmaking of Revolutions: The Antagonistic Symbiosis of Youth Generated Media and Mainstream Media’. Jean Burgess will lead this discussion drawing on a range of conceptual models and empirical examples of citizenship in global digital culture.
15.00 – 15.15: Break
16:00: Close