Culture and the role of civic engagement
Our fourth annual event took place 6-7 September 2016 at the Millennium Gallery, Sheffield. Our community partners, co-research team and international colleagues came together to explore the role of culture in civic engagement and see a co-produced exhibition of work from across the Imaging project.
On the evening of 6 September, the exhibition was opened with public talks given by our guest speakers Kim Streets (Museums Sheffield), Paul Ward (University of Huddersfield), Mariam Shah (Who is your neighbour?) and leading cultural thinker Francois Matarasso on Culture and the City. This was followed by questions from members of the audience.
The following day, we were all encouraged to think about our cultural identities and get talking with Angie Hart’s (University of Brighton/BoingBoing) Culture Identity Wall activity.
We then divided into groups for the first workshop sessions:
- Co-designing resilience (Scott Dennis, BoingBoing).
- Re-gilding the ghetto: pictures of life in the North East from 1970s to present day (Andrea Armstrong, Durham University).
- Walking tour of Park Hill flats (Paul Allender and Louise Ritchie, the University of Sheffield, and Prue Chiles, Newcastle University).
- Turning the tables on popular culture – sharing vinyl records and stories (Paul Ward, the University of Huddersfield).
During the lunchbreak there was a chance to view the exhibition and hear Zahir Rafiq talk about re-imagining identities through his portraits of British Muslims in their everyday lives.
After lunch there was a second round of workshops:
- Co-designing resilience (repeated).
- Photographic exhibition and talk on John Blakemore prints from Coventry (Ben Kyneswood).
- Culture and Hope film showing and discussion (Laura Sillars, Site Gallery).
- Art and the city (David Bell and Richard Steadman-Jones, the University of Sheffield).
The event drew to a close with a world café style discussion to reflect on what we had learnt about the role of art and culture in civic engagement and from our co-produced research on the Imagine project.
Kate Pahl ended the day expressing her appreciation.
Thank you to everyone who came and ran amazing workshops, did wonderful art work, wrote beautiful poems, gave fantastic talks, showed films, photographs, produced amazing ideas and contributed in so many ways to make this such a unique, vibrant and successful day.
Kate Pahl
Principal Investigator of the Imagine project