Who Goes to Museums? (and who doesn’t?)

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Lisanne Gibson explains how her Museum Studies teaching intersects with the UEP project in a video of a mini lecture of her research.
 
WHO goes to museums TP stats

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The figures tell us that museum visiting has been increasing.
 
According to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Taking Part statistics, 51.8% of adults attended a museum once, in the first Quarter of 2014/15, compared to 42.3% in 2005/06 (the year the Taking Part survey began).
 

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Research and Communities: Effects in Glasgow

Ruth Webber is a PhD researcher on the UEP project. Currently based in Glasgow, Ruth’s PhD was made possible by UEP’s partnership with Glasgow Life. Her blog below reflects on her position as a researcher undertaking two ethnographies in Glasgow communities. As such she is involved in research that is connected to, and in dialogue with, the issues raised by the debate surrounding the controversial Glasgow Effect art project by Ellie Harrison. Continue reading

Are Britain’s Youth All Scrooges?

Mark Taylor and the team have been having a look at new data on participation in Christmas traditions.

The newest wave of Understanding Society has recently been released on the UK Data Service. For the first time, this wave has included data on some Christmas-related activities: putting up a Christmas tree, distributing Christmas cards, and giving gifts. Continue reading

Breaking the Temple of the Culture – Well-being Relationship

Susan Oman gave her first keynote at Tate Liverpool last week. Below are some sections of the presentation and some thoughts on the plenary panel.

Culture is frequently described in terms of its relationship to well-being. Often, the implication being, that culture is only as GOOD as the quality of its attachment to well-being. Well-being is the patriarch, the most powerful and the one to do the serious work of policy, while culture is there to make us feel pretty. While playing with the ways in which the culture – well-being relationship is represented, the serious work of my provocation is to ask for a rethinking of this portrayal in order to move forward. To break not only the Temples of Culture, to cite the name of this event, but what seem to be sacred depictions of culture, as relative to well-being, in policy.

 

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Soundings and Findings: A Connected Communities Research Conference

AGM orangeUEP’s PI, Andy Miles introduces the UEP panel at the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Soundings and Findings conference, together with slides and audio from contributors.

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Histories Symposium: a record of the day

On the 24th April 2015, Lisanne Gibson and Eleonora Belfiore organised a one-day symposium at the University of Leicester to showcase emerging work from the ‘Histories’ strand of the project, which sees the team exploring in a critical-historical perspective present-day notions and discourses of participation, cultural value and the relations between them. Continue reading

Marking Out Boundaries, Making Up Places: Everyday Participation and Constructions of Cultural Value

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UEP researchers, Delyth, Jill, Mark, Lisanne, Andy and Susan present at the British Sociological conference 2015 on a UEP panel, organised by our Principal Investigator, Andy Miles Continue reading