CKC 2023: New Futures for Creative Economies
Day 1
Envisioning Futures for Creative Economies: Language and Power
Moderator:
Vikki Jones, University of Edinburgh
Panellists:
Morvern Cunningham, freelance ex-producer and cultural commentator
Euella Jackson & Jess Bunyan, Co-Directors of Rising Arts Agency, Bristol
Tiki Muir, Community Development Lead, WHALE Arts, Edinburgh
Stephen Welsh, freelance curator, consultant, and creative producer
Abstract
We are used to talking about creative economies through terminologies that include ‘success’, ‘value’, ‘impact’ and ‘growth’. But what would happen if we examined the structures and practices of creative economies through the language of challenge, failure,and risks a means of finding possible, preferable, and hopeful futures (Kozubaev et al. 2020).
This roundtable session will bring together a group of academics, researchers, independent creatives, and creative practitioners from around the UK to pool knowledge, perspectives and learning from recent projects. Together, we will collectively reimagine futures for culture that seek to explore links between the language we use to describe our work and the imbalances of power in current structures that reinforce known inequities in access to creative economies and perceptions of cultural value.
Languages of audience development, community and outreach, and arts for health and wellbeing imply a benevolence that champions economic and commercial imperatives as the only way to support communities of practice and audiences that are perceived as peripheral. This landscape reinforces a structure where centralised organisations and funders are painted as the only suitable holders of the keys to the kingdom of culture.
Recent work by panellists suggests that while the cultural and creative sectors are becoming more competent and confident at communicating around value and values, the values held by those with the power in the sector to ‘do’ the creative economy often remain more conventionally wedded to traditional, ‘top down’ approaches and assumptions.
By framing this session around language and power, our aim is to avoid the inclination to showcase creative work and economies as monolithic projects, driven from a centralised, visionary source. Instead, we will open conversations about how a redistribution of creativity, skills and resources that accepts risk unequivocally and actively learns from failure, can address power imbalance, and help us to envision and co-create new creative economies.
We will imagine worlds where funding and measurements of success are flexible and non-contingent on impactor delivery, and where space can be made for confident risk-taking to generate a shift in values and rebalancing of power in making creative economies work.
References:
Biographies
Moderator:
Vikki Jones
Vikki is an arts and humanities researcher, currently based in Creative Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Her research examines the communication of value and values in the arts and creative industries and explores the developing language and contexts of data-driven cultural outputs. Her work considers the relationship and tensions between creativity and digital platforms; the challenges and labour of conducting digital research and evaluation; and ways in which the data enacted by, through and for cultural work and programmes might be critically operationalised towards equitable cultural infrastructure.
Panel:
Morvern Cunningham
Morvern is a freelance creative, cultural commentator and ex-producer based in Edinburgh. They founded the community-based arts festival LeithLate in 2011 before setting the organisation up as a charity almost a decade later. Morvern is currently Creative Lead of the Scottish Government-funded national Culture Collective Programme Lead team, and co-Project Lead of the Creative Community Hubs project in Edinburgh. Morvern authored two pamphlets during the pandemic: “You’ll Have Had Your City?” and Edinburgh Reimagined: The Future Will Be Localised.
Euella Jackson and Jess Bunyan
Euella Jackson and Jess Bunyan (she/her) are Co-Directors of Rising Arts Agency in Bristol, a genuinely youth-led social enterprise where underrepresented creatives fulfil their creative ambitions and affect wider cultural change through the arts. We advocate for care centred, anti-racist and decolonialist practice as standard and fight for everyone’s right to be creative.
Tiki Muir
Tiki Muir (she/her) currently works as a Community Development Lead at Whale Arts, the cultural anchor organisation for Wester Hailes, in south-west Edinburgh. In 2021 she and Morvern Cunningham began co-facilitating the Creative Community Hubs project, supporting the development of a network of creative community hubs across Edinburgh. They co-authored a report and accompanying poster, released in 2022, entitled Working Better Together, which focuses on partnership working between community hubs and cultural institutions in the city.
In 2022 she was a collaborator in the Community Wellbeing Collective group, a project initiated by artist Jeanne van Heeswijk as a commission for the 2022 Edinburgh Art Festival. Tiki co-produced Tales from the Hales, a podcast mini-series platforming voices from the Wester Hailes community, as a contributing to Watch This Space, an ongoing space and programme of events hosted by the collective.
Stephen Welsh
Stephen (he/him) is a freelance curator, consultant and cultural practitioner specialising in supporting museums and heritage organisations to embed co-creation, diversify decision-making, and prioritise the needs and aspirations of underserved communities.
From 2007 until 2020, he was the Curator of Living Cultures and Acting Deputy Head of Collections at the Manchester Museum, part of the University of Manchester. In this role, he was responsible for improving community access to a collection of over 18,000 cultural heritage items from Africa, America, Asia, and the Pacific, and in partnership with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Studies, he led the unconditional repatriation of 43 cultural heritage items to Aboriginal communities. Prior to this, he was a project curator working on the development and delivery of the International Slavery Museum, National Museums Liverpool, from 2005 to 2007.
Since 2016, he has been a committee member for the National Lottery Heritage Fund North, and in 2021 he was appointed as a trustee for Homotopia, the UK’s longest-running LGBTQIA+ arts and culture festival. He served as an advisory panel member for the Arts and Humanities Research Council project Towards an Inclusive GLAM Hub from 2021 to 2022 and has also sat on committees for the Islamic Art and Material Culture Subject Specialist Network and the Museum Ethnographers Group.
Vikki Jones
Morvern Cunningham
Euella Jackson
Jess Bunyan
Tiki Muir
