A multi-disciplinary team led by CRESC Senior Research Fellow Dr Andrew Miles has been awarded £1.5 million by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a five-year research project under its Communities, Culture and Creative Economies funding programme.

‘Understanding Everyday Participation – Articulating Cultural Values’ proposes a radical re-evaluation of the relationship between participation and cultural value. Bringing together evidence from in-depth historical studies, re-analysis of existing survey data and new qualitative research on the detail, dynamics and significance of day-to-day cultural practices and engagements, the project aims to create new understandings of community formation, connectivity and capacity through participation.

Miles leads a team of experts drawn from history, the social sciences, and cultural policy at the universities of Manchester, Leicester, Exeter and Warwick together with leading policy researchers in the cultural sector. The project is supported by 16 national and local partners, including Arts Council England, the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, and the Working Men’s Cubs and Institutes Union, with Creative Scotland making a substantial investment to support additional case study work (see below for a full list of project partners).

The project’s premise is that orthodox models of the creative economy and ensuing cultural policy are based on a narrow definition of cultural participation; one that captures formal engagement with traditional cultural institutions, such as museums and galleries, but overlooks other activities, for instance community festivals, hobbies and a range of informal, ostensibly mundane, everyday activities. This frame, founded historically on deficit based assumptions of the logics for state cultural support, misses opportunities to understand the variety of forms of participation, the stakes that attach to these, and their (positive and negative) consequences.

The core research questions the project will address are:

• How, historically, did we arrive at the definitions, fields of knowledge and policy frames informing notions of cultural participation and value today?
• What are the forms and practices of everyday participation - where do they take place? How are they valued? And how do these practices relate to formal participation?
• How is participation shaped by space, place and locality?
• How are communities made, unmade, divided and connected through participation?
• How can broader understandings of value in and through participation be used to inform the development of vibrant communities and creative local economies?
• How do we reconnect cultural policy and institutions with everyday participation?

 These questions will be approached through an exploration of the contexts, processes and outcomes of participation, understood as temporally and physically situated phenomena. Here the project will engage critically with Bourdieu’s central concepts of field, habitus and capital as a broad theoretical frame through which to explore the dynamics and stakes of unofficial and day-to-day participation practices.  Accordingly, the research will focus on six contrasting 'cultural ecosystems' (Manchester, Peterborough, Gateshead and Dartmoor in England, and Aberdeen and Stornoway in Scotland) to investigate the connections between multiple understandings of community (geographical, elective, identity based etc), cultural value, the creative economy and everyday participation.

 The findings from the situated case studies will inform four partnership-operated trials of new policy interventions or of professional or community practices. Throughout the project research will be integrated with key partners, stakeholders and cultural and community organisations in order to evolve better shared understandings of everyday cultural participation and the implications of this for policy makers and cultural organisations at national, local and community levels. In this context, new understandings of the relationships between everyday participation, community and cultural value promise to reveal evidence of hidden assets and resources that can be mobilised to promote better identification and more equitable resourcing of cultural opportunities, generate well-being and contribute to the development of creative local economies.

Project Partner organisations:

• Arts Council England
• Clore Duffield Foundation
• Creative Scotland
• Department of Culture, Media and Sport
• English Heritage
• Local Government Group
• Manchester City Council
• Museums Association
• National Council for Voluntary Organisations
• Norfolk Museums and Archaeology
• Paul Hamlyn Foundation
• Sport England
• Sustrans
• Vivacity
• Voluntary Arts Network
• Working Men’s Club and Institutes Union

For further information about this project contact Dr Andrew Miles (andrew.miles@manchester.ac.uk)