Centre for Arts and Learning Events

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

• Professor Gemma Moss: Refashioning school and community links post-COVID

Recordings of Past Events