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

West Bowling Together – On Participation and Heritage in a Bradfordian Suburb

ruth circleRuth Webber reflects on a film she made on participation and heritage in West Bowling

The film’s title, West Bowling Together, was inspired by sociologist Robert Putnam’s seminal book Bowling Alone (2001). Putnam describes declining ‘social capital’ in the United States since the 1950s, and proposes the importance of civic participation and social interaction for developing and maintaining community. Continue reading

BBC’s Thinking Allowed: The British Weekend

Jill Ebrey talks everyday participation and the British weekend on BBC’s Thinking Allowed

This programme, first broadcast in 2010, introduces the weekend as a subject for debate. Featuring Jill Ebrey and Richard Reeves (Director of the think tank Demos), it traces a history of the weekend from its origins in the nineteenth century Saturday half-day holiday, through a high point in the second half of the twentieth century to its possible demise in the deregulated twenty first century. Based around Jill’s research with supermarket workers in Salford, it considers how everyday participation in the social and collective life of the weekend is constrained by working on Saturdays and Sundays. Continue reading

A Santa-driven creative economy​

SANTA kids sleigh

Mark Taylor maps an alternative Creative Christmas Economy.

This week saw the release of NESTA’s interactive data visualisations of the UK’s creative economy, which acknowledge the diversity of UK’s creative occupations. For the festive season, we’ve mapped two interpretations of the Christmas economy using Census data on occupations. Continue reading

A researcher’s journey into understanding everyday participation in Glasgow

ruth circleRuth Webber invites you to follow her journey                                   into understanding everyday participation in Glasgow                       by way of her new blog

Ruths blog headerGovanhill Community Baths – where I met with Jim, who told me about the 13 year long struggle to regain community ownership following its closure in 2001. It has now been opened again for 2 and a half years. He showed me around this majestic (and cold!) building and talked to me about plans, projects, including a vision to eventually have community allotments in the cubicles under the huge glass roof, where people would be able to grow and eat their own food

govanhill community baths

To continue reading Ruth’s blog, click here: In Dialogue with Glasgow 

 

 

Discussing the value and politics of everyday participation in second-hand cultures

Delyth Edwards offers some reflections on her time spent in a Cheetham Hill charity shop

At the CRESC 2014 conference I presented a paper on the ethnography I carried out as a volunteer in a charity shop in Cheetham Hill, North Manchester. The subject of the conference was Power, Culture and Social Framing. It made sense to focus on the concept of charity and how it was in itself a discourse that had been framed and (re)framed over the centuries leading to the creation of charity shopping as we know it today. Continue reading