212 episodes

Miaaw.net: four monthly series, one a week, audio essays, conversations and discussions about cultural democracy and the commons.

Week 1: Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse
Week 2: Genuine Inquiry
Week 3: A Culture of Possibility
Week 4: Common Practice

What is cultural democracy? How can we move towards it? How likely are we to achieve it? What does it have to do with "the arts"? What does it have to do with a post-digital future? What does it have to do with the commons?

MIAAW.net Sophie Hope & Owen Kelly

    • Society & Culture

Miaaw.net: four monthly series, one a week, audio essays, conversations and discussions about cultural democracy and the commons.

Week 1: Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse
Week 2: Genuine Inquiry
Week 3: A Culture of Possibility
Week 4: Common Practice

What is cultural democracy? How can we move towards it? How likely are we to achieve it? What does it have to do with "the arts"? What does it have to do with a post-digital future? What does it have to do with the commons?

    Hearing What Isn’t Being Said

    Hearing What Isn’t Being Said

    In the fifth episode of Ways of Listening, artist Jody Wood talks about listening as a practice of care - where to care is not to cure. Jody advocates for participatory ‘opt in’ structures for social practice art rather than co-creation, noting the complexity of human desires and potential for conflicting agendas.

    She goes on to question the expectations placed on artists to solve social issues. Using examples from projects taking place with social workers and in homelessness shelters, Jody talks through the need to resist the spectacle, and keep focus on process and the power of a relational practice.

    She also highlights the need to listen to yourself, as a spiritual practice of attunement.

    • 21 min
    Convivial Tools

    Convivial Tools

    This continues a mini-series that looks at whether or not we should feel concerned about the digital tools we use and the effects that they have on us. In this episode Owen Kelly explains three dimensions that we need to consider when thinking about the tools we use and why we use them.

    • 35 min
    Rest & Rage in Rome

    Rest & Rage in Rome

    In early February Sophie Hope went to Rome to present Manual Labours’ work at a conference. In this episode She and Fabiola Fiocco tell us about the workshop they did at MACRO - the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome.

    The workshop was organised by Fabiola Fiocco in collaboration with the Arts Module of the Master in Gender Studies (Roma Tre University) and facilitated by Fabiola and Sophie. They explain the background to the workshop and their research into bodies at work and the politics of exhaustion.

    Sophie and Fabiola then reflect on some of the themes and issues that came up during the workshop, such as where people go to both rest and rage; the dependencies and addictions that get people through the day and barriers to collectivising care and rest for freelance workers.

    • 42 min
    Preservation, Reinvention & Traditional Music in Scotland

    Preservation, Reinvention & Traditional Music in Scotland

    David Francis comes from Dumfries in the south west of Scotland, but cut his musical teeth in the north east, playing for bands like Desperate Danz Band. He moved to Edinburgh in the 1990s and became a central figure in traditional music: performing with Mairi Campbell in the successful duo The Cast while occupying key positions in the Scottish Arts Council traditional music section and the Edinburgh Folk Festival.

    In Culture of Possibility #37, Arlene Goldbard talks with David Francis, who currently acts as Director of the Traditional Music Forum in Scotland, about its impressive network of traditional musicians, preservation, reinvention, formal and informal education, Scottish cultural policy and funding, and the whole tapestry of issues, questions, and possibilities it engages.

    • 1 hr
    Building Listening into Everything

    Building Listening into Everything

    Lady Kitt is a disabled artist and drag king, describing their work as “Mess Making as Social Glue”. Kitt works on long term, collaborative projects driven by insatiable curiosity about how art can be useful.

    Projects are usually punctuated by the creation of large-scale, vibrant installations / sites for exchange made from recycled paper, reused plastics and raw clay, which Kitt calls shrines. They use crafting, performance, joy and research to create objects, interactions and events, with the wild ambition of dismantling and mischievously re-crafting spaces and systems they find discriminatory, obsolete or just quite dull.

    In this episode Kitt describes a ‘collaborative sandwich’ activity that helps to build relationships at the start of a community project, and ways they make space for listening throughout this work.

    • 22 min
    Convivial Mechanics

    Convivial Mechanics

    This episode begins a mini-series that looks at whether or not we should feel concerned about the digital tools we use and the effects that they have on us. The tools we use and the uses we make of them have changed since the web began in the early nineties. Twenty years ago people created blogs and surfed the web looking for like-minded people. Today most people create personal pages on social media platforms and search inside Facebook to find new “friends”.

    Does this difference matter?

    Owen Kelly looks at the history of the web and the ways that these changes happened and suggests that we can find a growing movement to reclaim the sense of discovery that used to pervade the web. He suggests that we revive the idea of the curated blog-roll and the collective web-ring, and promises that Miaaw will introduce modern versions of these on its website soon.

    • 29 min

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