Centre for Arts and Learning Events

Recordings of past events and links to register for upcoming events are here

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All For the Arts – CAL Theme 2022-23

The Centre for Arts and Learning is reflecting on what it means to be All For the Arts. Our research events in 2022-23 will generate provocations that raise the significance of positive inclusivity in all spheres of art and education. To encourage access and participation in the arts, we will be entering into debates about how cultural inequality is bad for us (Brook et al 2020). We are going to the difficult places, finding the knotty problems, the intangibilities of difference and the ‘discontents’ (Bishop 2012).

When encountering reluctance to make the arts accessible for all, we will be exploring critical mirrors and strategies for vocal resistance. This ‘transversal politics’ for equality (Meskimmon 2020) aims to challenge policies that are increasingly limiting access to learning in the arts. CAL will be taking a standpoint, for a surge of positivity towards the arts in education.

Taking into account the evidence that the arts need to become more adaptable to gathering understandings of intersectionality (Collins 2019, Nash 2019) CAL will be acknowledging complexities of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability, from the beginning roots of practice to organisational level. We propose that inclusive arts education needs to be further encouraged at all life stages. We would like to question how diverse approaches to being All For the Arts can enable responsive adaptations in practice.

CAL will explore inclusive arts education in a series of seminars, workshops and projects. We intend to find out how the arts can produce ways of working that offer the warmth of belonging, and the feistiness of creative social action (hooks 2019, Collins 2019). In this research programme, learning spaces will be activated to express the challenging issues that emerge. Arts practice can be seen as the daily extraordinary, finding and mapping the incredible in the everyday.

Bishop, C., & American Council of Learned Societies. (2012). Artificial hells participatory art and the politics of spectatorship (ACLS Humanities E-Book). London: Verso.

Brook, O., O'Brien, D., & Taylor, M. (2020). Culture is bad for you : Inequality in the cultural and creative industries. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Collins, P. Hill. (2019) Intersectionality: As critical social theory. Croydon: Duke University Press.

hooks, b. (2019) Belonging: A culture of place. Abingdon and New York: Taylor & Francis.

Meskimmon, M. (2020). Transnational feminisms, transversal politics and art : Entanglements and intersections (The transnational feminisms and the arts trilogy ; [volume 1]). Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.

Upcoming Events

The Centre for Arts and Learning and PSST Practice Research Network would like to invite you to attend All For the Arts: Dr James Bulley, Creating Practice Research.

Time and Location: Tuesday 29 November, 5.30-7pm in-person at 288 New Cross Road
Booking URL: All For the Arts: Dr James Bulley, Creating Practice Research

This event is for all who want to learn more about practice research. Within this talk, Dr James Bulley will explore the growing research field of practice research, expanding upon the findings of recent reports co-authored with Dr Özden Şahin What is practice research? and How can practice research be shared? published in 2021 (commissioned by Research England and PRAG-UK). In particular, Bulley will focus on the common issues facing creative practitioners working in and across the field of practice research.

Recordings of Past Events

2022

All For the Arts - John Baldacchino, Art's Exiting into the World: Willed Strangers in Pursuit of Inclusion, 1 November 2022

Miranda Matthews CAL Ecologies in Practice: Weaving Threads, 13 July 2022

Ecologies in Practice Series - WochenKlausur, What art can do, 4 May 2022