Critical evaluation and cultural values

This paper offers a critical perspective on the ‘norms’ and ‘forms’ of evaluation in relation to participatory arts in general, and digital storytelling in particular. The evaluation of arts-based community interventions, presents numerous challenges and opportunities. These include balancing the economic and political imperatives of funding bodies with the desire to establish recognition and reputation with a like-minded community of interest, according to shared notions of practice, identity and value. Evaluation is often reduced to monitoring, evidence gathering and advocacy in order to meet the expectations of funders and commissioners. However, evaluation can be a genuine opportunity for critical reflection on the value of a project for all partners and participants. Drawing on examples, this paper will examine the relationship between the values that underpin a project, organization or programme of work and how they are they can be incorporated (or not) into an evaluation of its success. Examining the EU funded projects 'Extending Creative Practice' and 'Silver Stories', the paper will look at how the stories and visual materials produced through these projects interplay within an evaluation context which might reach beyond the commissioned framework. Addressing issues of translation in multipartner projects, the paper also aims to understand the processes involved in unpicking the local, national and transnational contexts of these visual arts projects.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Asdatown: The intersections of classed places and identities

This chapter explores the intersections between classed places and identities, focusing on the UK and examining the ways in which the figures of the ‘chav’ and the ‘pikey’ have been represented in British popular culture and in official policy discourses. It argues that these representations conflate the racialized identity of the Gypsy Traveller with white working class identities and draw on the presence or proximity of Irish or Gypsy Travellers to the white ‘underclass’ in order to metonymically racialize the white working class as a whole. The politics of space is central to this process. Existing sociological and cultural geography literature hints at the active role of the spatial imaginary in classing people (Charleworth 2000, Robson 2000, Haylett 2000, Hewitt 2005, Skeggs 2005). This chapter argues that particular spaces and places – housing estates, and places described as ‘chav towns’ – are used discursively as a way of fixing people in racialized class positions

Active Learning for Active Citizenship: participatory approaches to evaluating a programme to promote citizen participation in England

Just as the notion of participatory approaches has been subjected to questioning and criticism, so has the more specific notion of participatory approaches to monitoring and evaluation. There are parallel possibilities of tokenism and even of manipulation, here, just as there are parallels around the need for more critical reflection and dialogue. Even if not actually manipulative, participatory evaluation can involve little more than the occasional use of particular techniques from a participatory toolkit. This article draws upon our experiences of evaluating a participatory programme to promote active citizenship in England, starting from our shared commitment to achieve more than this. Building upon principles and experiences of best practice, the aim was to use participatory principles ‘in order to democratise social change’ (Cousins and Whitmore, 1998.7), addressing the challenges of putting participatory principles into practice right from the outset, through to the completion of the final report. We begin by summarising key arguments from previous debates. This sets the context for the discussion of our case study, as evaluators of this particular programme. Finally, we conclude by reflecting upon our experiences of working with some of the tensions inherent in the processes associated with participatory monitoring and evaluation, identifying similarities with as well as differences from Kate Newman’s conclusions, on the basis of her experiences in the global South

Curating Community? The Relational and Agonistic Value of Participatory Arts in Superdiverse Localities

Background Executive Summary The Curating Community Workshop developed out of an interest in urban regeneration, cultural policy and participatory art. It drew on the extensive experience in developing, delivering and evaluating community interventions that span participatory arts. The Workshop brought together artists, commissioners, researchers, educationalists and practitioners from community development and from a range of arts practices including community art, socially engaged art practice, participatory theatre and participatory arts. The participants critiqued the ideological presuppositions which often assist participatory art: that participation has straightforward positive social impacts on participants, that there is a clear cause and effect relationship between participation and participants behaviour, and that this social impact can be evidenced through evaluative ‘toolkits’. The Workshop discussion recognised the fact that that artists and arts organisations are often negotiating a complex urban context, creating spaces of dialogue and exchange through participatory social programmes in a context of increased socio-economic inequality and population churn. The Workshop invited participants to reflect on these matters, placing emphasis on the relational encounters that characterise this work, rather than its value as an instrument of urban policy. Focusing on art that occurs in urban regeneration and post-regeneration contexts – and the extent to which communities in super diverse neighbourhoods are constituted through such projects – Workshop participants considered the troubled relationship between the aesthetic dimensions of ‘participative’, ‘collaborative’ or ‘socially engaged’ art practice and the politics of community education, engagement and empowerment. A second area of discussion was the governmentality of evaluation and its accompanying methodologies that can overlook, underestimate and distort the agonistic significance and community and ‘relational impact’ of participatory art interventions. Alternatives to the norms and forms of evaluation were explored. The Workshop explored the following questions: how are forms of ‘community’ instantiated and negated through participatory arts? How far can artists make apparent the conflicting positions of stakeholders in arts participation projects? What would be the consequences of this? What is the ‘community impact’ of participatory arts? What is its relational significance? Is antagonism and heterogeneity in participatory arts valuable in relation to civil society? How do affinities and connections between people and space emerge from collective arts participation and other organised social activities

Modalities of Exchange: A summary Report

A report on the Serpentine Project Skills Exchanbg

Arts and Mental Health: Creative Collisions and Critical Conversations

Report from AHRC Cultural Value expert workshop on arts and mental health partnerships. The Workshop took as its starting point Creative Families an innovative multi-agency partnership between the arts education arm of a contemporary art gallery (South London Gallery) and the South London and Maudsley’s Parental Mental Health Team. The tensions identified by the evaluation of this ‘early intervention’ were shared in order to illustrate the contrasting framing of ‘cultural value’ apparent in this collaboration. Uniquely, this interdisciplinary partnership combines a participative process evaluation led by the centre for Urban and Community Research, and a clinical assessment led by the Institute of Psychiatry. These contrasting methodologies for identifying the projects ‘value’ across both art and (mental) health contexts were shared in order to provoke interdisciplinary discussion. Examples of creative and professional practice, which intervene into the field of mental health, provided starting points for thinking about the cultural values that are enacted, reproduced and sometimes challenged by these approaches. The Workshop examined the policy drivers behind these arts/mental health collaborations, and the epistemological and methodological systems of value, which account for them for a variety of audiences

The early death of Colonel Robert C. Tytler and the afterlife of his collection

A letter by Allan Octavian Hume and three by Bertram Bevan-Petman, all written between 1904 and 1911 to Ernst Hartert, bird curator of Rothschild’s Tring Museum, are present in the Rothschild Tring archive, now held by the Natural History Museum. These shed light on both the probable cause of the early death in 1872 of Colonel Robert C. Tytler, British army officer and naturalist in colonial India, and on the somewhat convoluted fate of his collection subsequently.Copyright: © 2021 Prys-Jones, R et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credite

Making It Together

An evaluative study of Creative Families, an arts and mental health partnership between South London Gallery and the Southwark Parental Mental Health Tea

Silver Stories Evaluation Report

This report is an evaluation of Silver Stories , a research and training partnership of nine organisatio ns from six countries. The project brought together expertise in digital storytelling, community engagement and education to train professionals working with community groups and elderly people. Silver Stories ran from October 2013 to September 2015 and was funded by the Eu ropean Commission’s Learning Programme, under the Leonardo da Vinci Lifelong Transfer of Innov ation sub -­‐ programme . This programme seeks to adopt and transfer existing innovative practices to new settings that included sectors, target groups and countries, made achievable by working with transnational partners. This evaluation report is a key proj ect deliverable to explore the efficacy of the project in delivering its aims , namely to: • Adapt and transfer learning methods from E xtending Creative Practice (E CP ) across the whole partnership and to two new countries and, working to provide VET for a new target professional group – i.e. trainers and employees working in the caring professions – across the whole partnership. • Establish a means for d igital s torytelling to be incorporated into the on -­‐ going training of professionals in all the partner countries. More detail on the evaluation methodology can be found in Appendix 1 This report considers the project delivery against the research aims and objectives as set out in the original project app lication. We draw on a range of sources and data including material provided by the project partners. The report reviews delivery, ident ifies achievements and successes as well as lessons learnt throughout . In doing so it makes recommendations about how the work pioneered through Silver Stories might usefully be taken forward

Takepart Learning Framework for active learning for active citizenship

Takepart Learning Framework for active learning for active citizenship. Guide for citizens, practioners and researcher