On the anniversary of the 2022 Commonwealth Games, Dr Claire French argues academics can play a unique role in bolstering a regional cultural sector in turmoil.
The Birmingham 2022 Festival ran for six months to complement the Commonwealth Games ©Birmingham 2022.
In a recent report analysing Culture Central’s Creative City Grants programme – part of the legacy of the Birmingham 2022 Festival following the Commonwealth Games – I conceptualised the Birmingham region as a volatile ecology. Such volatility is well-known, with £453.7million of gross value added to the region through the Games followed by £300million of Birmingham City Council budget cuts over three years, influencing most services and eroding the culture budget entirely over that period.
By definition, community artists are in close dialogue with local people and places. They include those at Legacy West Midlands who have gamified footpaths to support the physical health and wellbeing of local residents, or Glue Collective who co-constructed magical outside spaces to practise sustainable dialogue with the environment alongside the next generation. These are examples of close listening and responsiveness to local communities that rely on lateral thinking and horizontal networks for resource sharing.
Such new systems for listening and communicating are also forms of policy created by an ‘active actor in political processes’ that energise place, practice, and politics, as envisaged by sociologist Nabanita Samanta and her view of the ecology. The cultural revolution of the 1960s is historical evidence for the power of such policy generated by community artists in changing volatile ecologies in the UK.
Findings of my report, which evaluated the community arts projects funded by Culture Central’s Creative City Grants programme, showed how community artists are prone to generate both a group-led counter-culture intrinsic to their horizontal values as well as model individualist cultures more common to the wider cultural sector.
Individualism is seen as the logic of developing one’s own resources in the image of individual goal attainment, and of course is reflected in and by the UK’s wider economic context. Performance scholar Gabriel Varghese suggests that counter-discourse ‘transmits culture and memory, and express[es] empathy and solidarity’. Counter-discourse can thus be understood as group-led facilitation of group solidarity that generates knowledge and builds momentum for the creation of new policies.
While the report poses that each are useful cultures for mediating new and old social/political/economic systems, I believe that academics play a crucial role in supporting community artists to nurture counter-discourse as a strategy for the volatile ecology. As a community artist, I have personal experience of this.
Academics at the University of Birmingham and resources from Culture Forward and the Sir Barry Jackson Award have been crucial to building a counter-discourse over the past two years. As an artist, instead of focusing on new individualist resources for competing in the volatile ecology, I harnessed my horizontal networks for instigating group reflection, storytelling and consciousness-raising.
Through this support by academics and the university, I have supported other community artists at organisations such as Soul City Arts and Saathi House with resources for reconceptualising their place in the ecology. These new perspectives on where we are now, and what we are capable of, are starting points for counter-discourse.
Academic-community-artist-partnerships are not just about locating funding from the university; they are about legitimising counter-discourse in the early and vulnerable moments of knowledge-making.
Knowledge, of course, needs prestige in order to be justified and maintained so that it can live on in the actions of others. Academics have personal resources for co-creating, legitimising and maintaining knowledge that are held in anything from their title (Dr or Prof.) to their readers and students. It is we academics who have the time to think through and amplify counter-discourse generated by community artists and communities.
Assistant Professor in Performance and Creative Practices
Biographical and contact information for Dr Claire French, Assistant Professor in Drama and Theatre Arts at the University of Birmingham.
