Yesterday we held a symposium at the University of Manchester which was attended by artists, academics, policy makers, creative practitioners, and others.
We heard from Huw Wahl, Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, Steven Hadley, Cathy Mackerras, Steve Vickers, Nick Wilson, Jonathan Gross, Andrew Miles all of whom added their voices to the debate and set off discussions and debates throughout the 60 or so delegates. The event aimed to ask whether and how previous debates about cultural democracy as voiced in the 1970s have anything to offer to contemporary discussion and practice.
In the evening we launched the book Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art: the British Community Arts Movement with stirring invocations from Nick Mahony, Adrian Sinclair and Jenny Hughes.
There’ll be a full report of the event soon but in the meantime here’s a link to a short film that was made for the launch and to Sophie Hope’s brilliant blog on the event.
community arts unwrapped 
I really enjoyed the symposium, thanks for putting on the event and to all the excellent speakers 🙂 It was such a useful day for making connections and thinking about the relevance of community arts and cultural democracy today.