miaaw.net

Arlene Goldbard | Sophie Hope | Owen Kelly | François Matarasso

once a week audio essays, conversations and discussions about cultural democracy, community-based art, and the commons.

  1. 4d ago

    No Agenda

    In this month’s episode of Parallel Streams we listen to an episode of a wildly popular podcast called No Agenda, published under a Creative Commons licence. The podcast is hosted as always by Adam Curry, and this episode features Rob Dew as co-host. PARALLEL STREAMS EPISODE 10 | OCTOBER 9 | 2026   PARTICIPANTS Adam Curry | Rob Dew | Owen Kelly   COMMENTARY Wikipedia says that “No Agenda is a podcast co-created by Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak. Since its launch, the show has been recorded twice weekly, on Thursdays and Sundays at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time, and is primarily focused on deconstructing and critiquing mainstream news media. Following Dvorak's death in July 2026, Curry announced that the podcast would continue, beginning with a memorial episode featuring stories and anecdotes from Dvorak's family and friends”. The show has no advertisers and instead relies entirely on donations. There are no guidelines for the amount and frequency of contributions; instead, these are left to the discretion of the listener, a model called “value for value" by the show's hosts. The show also relies on its listeners—dubbed "producers"—to provide artwork and audio clips. They have over 1,400,000 listeners per episode and - WARNING - the episodes can last up to three hours in length. The episode we have chosen to rebroadcast is episode 1904 titled Junkie Communism and first broadcast on September 17, 2026. It lasts approximately two hours and forty five minutes. REFERENCES The No Agenda website https://noagendashow.net The Tribute to John C Dvorak episode https://noagendashow.net/listen/1889 About Value for Value https://noagendashow.net/about/value4value About the No Agenda community https://noagendashow.net/producers  Adam Curry's microblog http://adam.curry.com/linkblog.html

    No Agenda
  2. Sep 11

    Creative Commons: a journey

    In this month’s episode of Parallel Streams we listen to an episode of a podcast from 2022. The series was called Open Minds and it ran for 21 episodes. It originated from the Creative Commons organisation and was therefore published under a Creative Commons licence.   PARALLEL STREAMS EPISODE 09 | SEPTEMBER 11 | 2026   PARTICIPANTS Owen Kelly | Brigitte Vézina   COMMENTARY At the time of this podcast Brigitte Vézina worked as Creative Commons’ Director of Policy, Open Culture, and GLAM. Brigitte said she felt “passionate about all things spanning culture, arts, handicraft, traditions, fashion and, of course, copyright law and policy”.   GLAM, in this context, stands for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. In her LinkedIn profile Brigitte describes her aim as “driving copyright policy change in the face of technological, social, and economic disruptions”.  Her current work involves “leading a multi-million dollar program for policy reform and capacity building to disrupt the system in which information, knowledge and culture are accessed, used, shared, and recreated digitally across the web. My mission is to influence those that make laws, policies, and norms at the international, regional (EU), and national levels to make those rules fairer, more balanced, and more supportive of the public interest”. In this episode of Open Minds she talks about her journey to Creative Commons.   REFERENCES Open Minds podcasts on Podbay https://podbay.fm/p/open-minds-from-creative-commons Open Minds on Creative Commons own website https://creativecommons.org/tag/open-minds/ OpenGLAM https://openglam.pubpub.org Wikipedia: history of Creative Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons Current Creative Commons licenses https://creativecommons.org/licenses/list.en There are more links available on the page for the original podcast https://podbay.fm/p/open-minds-from-creative-commons/e/1643758172

    Creative Commons: a journey
  3. Sep 4

    Community is all we have

    Owen Kelly looks at a number of current events and relates them to the arguments that Sarah Wilson puts forward in her new book I Eat the Stars: How to Live Fully and Beautifully in a Collapsing World.    Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse EPISODE 90 | September 5 | 2026    PARTICIPANT Owen Kelly   COMMENTARY Wendell Berry died this week at the age of 92, and so what I had planned for this episode changed to focus more on the contrast between his world view and the world view of the tech bros leading us into an irreversible climate catastrophe. The episode still draws from my reading of Sarah Wilson’s book I Eat The Stars although it no longer attempts a proper review. Perhaps that will come later. It draws together a number of different news stories: a corporate court case; a social media company selling early access to a president's posts; betting markets hiding in plain sight; a clear pattern behind online pile-ons; and a theory about disconnection and climate change. The conclusion remains the same: in the final analysis ideas of community and communal culture are all we have and we need to keep regenerating and rewilding them.   REFERENCES I Eat The Stars by Sarah Wilson https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/808096/i-eat-the-stars-by-sarah-wilson/ Your worst fears about cultural collapse might be true – here’s what you can do about it (an interview with Sarah Wilson) https://www.theguardian.com/wellness/2026/jul/29/sarah-wilson-book-interview Spirituality+Health interview with Sarah Wilson https://www.spiritualityhealth.com/articles/2020/12/29/this-one-wild-and-precious-life-sarah-wilson NPR: Beloved writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry has died at age 92 https://www.npr.org/2026/09/01/1139228585/wendell-berry-obituary PBS NewsHour: Paid early access to Trump's posts raises insider trading questions https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/paid-early-access-to-trumps-posts-raises-insider-trading-questions MetaMask News: Top prediction market categories to watch in 2026 https://metamask.io/news/top-prediction-market-categories-2026 NPR: Judge sides with Meta in antitrust trial, will not spin off WhatsApp and Instagram https://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5495626/meta-ftc-instagram-whatsapp-antitrust-ruling HHS Surgeon General: Social Media and Youth Mental Health https://www.hhs.gov/surgeongeneral/reports-and-publications/youth-mental-health/social-media/index.html New Statesman: The dangers of public shaming, mob justice and scolding on the internet https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2014/01/dangers-public-shaming-mob-justice-and-scolding-internet Axios: New book 'Commander in Cheat' goes long on Trump's golf game https://www.axios.com/donald-trump-golf-book-rick-reilly-21b439c1-2de5-4e34-9370-37d666fa9b86.html Kentucky Lantern: Kentucky writer, farmer and advocate Wendell Berry dies at 92 https://kentuckylantern.com/2026/08/31/kentucky-writer-farmer-and-advocate-wendell-berry-dies-at-92/ QuoteFancy: Top 450 Wendell Berry Quotes https://quotefancy.com/wendell-berry-quotes

    Community is all we have
  4. Aug 28

    Performance and Communication Skills

    We continue our exploration of social practice programmes and projects at Guildhall School of Music and Drama from the 1970s-2020s.  In this episode we hear from three alumni of the Performance and Communication Skills course.  Echoes and the Unsaid  EPISODE 08 | AUGUST 28 | 2026   HOSTS Jo Gibson | Sophie Hope   COMMENTARY  Sara Lee took the course in its first year, 1984, and recalls the formative placement she went on at Wormwood Scrubs prison, describing a defining moment when they played a piece of music written by one of the inmates. Paul Griffiths and Tim Steiner joined the course in 1987. Paul had been at Community Music  and participated in John Stevens' Search and Reflect workshops, and Tim had been studying music at the University of Sussex with Peter Wiegold, the artistic director of PCS.  The group reflect on their experiences of the course, with Tim and Peter discussing the disconnect between the experimental work they were doing at Guildhall and the work they were sent to do in schools and youth clubs, which they didn't find very inspiring. They recall how the PCS course was looked down on by other departments at Guildhall, and was unofficially referred to as "Piss, Crap and Shit."  They discuss the extent to which attitudes have changed, and how more needs to be done to raise the profile of the kind of work being done by musicians in society.  They discuss how this is about artists making experimental work in different contexts, collaboratively with others, rather than facilitating other people’s music.   REFERENCES Sara Lee https://irenetaylortrust.com/what-we-do/meet-the-team/office-staff-and-project-team/ Tim Steiner http://www.timsteiner.co.uk/ Paul Griffiths https://www.sco.org.uk/profile/paul-griffiths/ John Stevens Search and Reflect workshops https://www.scribd.com/document/758658457/John-Stevens-search-Reflect-1 Community Music https://future.london/organisation/community-music/ Peter Weigold https://thethirdorchestra.org/peter-wiegold School of Culture and Community Studies (now Sussex Centre for Cultural Studies), University of Sussex https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/centres/centre-for-cultural-studies/ Music, Society, Education by Christpher Small (1977) https://muse.jhu.edu/book/1800 Loose Tubes Big Band https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_Tubes Mark Withers https://www.markwithers.net/bio Sean Gregory https://www.gsmd.ac.uk/staff/prof-sean-gregory Lincoln Abbotts https://seamusicacademy.online/profile/lincoln-abbotts/ The Messengers https://metamorphonics.co.uk/meet-the-messengers/ ImPossibilities https://www.gsmd.ac.uk/whats-on/guildhall-jazz-festival-impossibilities Portuguese Cultural Action group Ondamerala https://ondamarela.pt/en/ondamarela-2/ Listen to the Leadership episode https://www.miaaw.net/e/leadership/ Listen to the Peter Renshaw episodes: Part 1  and Part 2    Join the De-Centre mailing list

    Performance and Communication Skills
  5. Aug 21

    Eric Booth: teacher artist

    In episode 67 of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso interview Eric Booth, a founding leader of the global field of teaching artistry and in music for social impact. A CULTURE OF POSSIBILITY EPISODE 67 | AUGUST 21 | 2026   PARTICIPANTS Eric Booth | Arlene Goldbard | François Matarasso   COMMENTARY Eric Booth is a founding leader of the global field of teaching artistry, a wide and fast-evolving field that combines artistry with pedagogical creativity.  For over forty-five years, Eric has guided teaching artists and arts organizations in what he calls “the ancient, underutilized power” of activating artistry in individuals and communities to simultaneously create beauty, engagement, and progressive social change.  In this wide-ranging episode, we introduce listeners to a wealth of projects and ideas that often overlap with community arts and cultural democracy but may not be well-known in that field.   References Eric Booth https://www.ericbooth.net/   Making Change book https://www.teachingartistsmakingchange.com/   The Purpose Threads https://www.ericbooth.net/essays-feed/the-purpose-threads   Academy for Impact Through Music https://www.aimpowers.com/   International Teaching Artist Collaborative https://itac-collaborative.com/ ArtistYear: https://artistyear.org/   New England Teaching Artist Collaborative https://www.ne-tac.org/   Artful Learning https://leonardbernstein.com/artful-learning

    Eric Booth: teacher artist

About

once a week audio essays, conversations and discussions about cultural democracy, community-based art, and the commons.

You Might Also Like