MIAAW.net
Miaaw.net: four monthly series, one a week, audio essays, conversations and discussions about cultural democracy and the commons.
Week 1: Meanwhile in an Abandoned Warehouse
Week 2: Genuine Inquiry
Week 3: A Culture of Possibility
Week 4: Common Practice
What is cultural democracy? How can we move towards it? How likely are we to achieve it? What does it have to do with "the arts"? What does it have to do with a post-digital future? What does it have to do with the commons?
- Update frequency
- every 7 days
- Average duration
- 37 minutes
- Episodes
- 284
- Years Active
- 2018 - 2025
Cultural Democracy at Mauna Kea
Over the summer Owen Kelly has become increasingly interested in the protests at the attempts to build a Thirty Metre Telescope on the north face of Mauna Kea, on the Big Island in Hawaii, and increa…
Helsinki Open Data
Timo Cantell works as the director of the Urban Research and Statistics Unit of the City of Helsinki, a unit of 35 people within the city council charged with gathering data, and publishing it in way…
Live from the Raymond Williams Society Annual Conference
On April 26 and 27 the Raymond Williams Society held its annual conference which addressed the topic: Cultural Production and the Redundancy of Work: precarity, automation and critique. The Movement …
Temporary democracy in a cultural space
In 2016 John Fail and Agnieszka Pokrywka began the first in a series of cultural experiments. They called it Temporary and they envisaged it as a space that would be owned by the people using it.
Agn…
The Story So Far...
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly use the twentieth episode of Meanwhile In An Abandoned Warehouse to look back at what has and hasn’t happened in the discussions so far. They discuss a number of ideas that…
Democracy in the Drawing Shed
Community Cultural Development in Australia
The idea of cultural democracy does not necessarily always wear that label. In different parts of the world it has acquired different names, and part of our quest is the attempt to discover it wherev…
Culture, Democracy & the right to make art
Alison Jeffers talks with Sophie Hope about how she got drawn into the community arts movement, and her personal journey from then to now. They discuss how the ways in which community arts has change…
The cultural democracy of amateur porn
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Susanna Paasonen on her research into amateur and user-generated porn. They talk about the long and poorly documented history of user-generated erotic media an…
DEFY and cultural democracy in India
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk to Abhijit Sinha about the nooks that Project Defy initiate. They discuss how nooks work, and what they mean for developing activism around maker spaces in Indian s…
Guild Socialism Restated
In this episode Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope discuss G.D.H. Cole’s book Guild Socialism Restated, published in 1920, and ask what relevance guild socialism might have to debates about cultural democ…
From participatory arts to cultural democracy
François Matarasso has just published a new book called A Restless Art, which looks at the growth of participatory arts and how it relates to community art and the idea of cultural democracy. Thi…
From community to participatory arts
François Matarasso first worked as a community artist in 1981. Since then he has worked in community arts, participatory arts, and as a writer and researcher. He has just published a new book call…
The resurgence of cultural democracy
This episode follows on from Episode 4 which looked at a kind of pre-history of cultural democracy, and Episode 6 which discussed the relationship between the community art movement in the 1980s a…
Culture & the Cultural Cities Enquiry
In February 2019 the report of the Cultural Cities Enquiry appeared, published by a consortium of Core Cities, Key Cities, consultants and arts funding agencies in the UK. Sophie Hope, Owen Kelly &…
Autobiography and cultural politics
Sophie Hope and Jonathan Gross discuss the relationship between autobiography and cultural action, and the needs to explore memory and history as a means of making sense of one’s own cultural poli…
Cultural Democracy across the ocean
This episode continues a conversation between Arlene Goldbard, in New Mexico; Sophie Hope, in London; and Owen Kelly, in Helsinki. The conversation begins by discussing the US Department of Arts an…
Cultural Democracy in the USA
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly talk with Arlene Goldbard, a writer, social activist and consultant from the USA, whose focus is the intersection of culture, politics, and spirituality. She is a long-t…
Community Art & Cultural Democracy
Sophie Hope and Owen Kelly discuss the reasons that cultural democracy began to find favour among some people working in the British community arts movement in the 1980s. They used it to describe …
Project Defy
Megha Sharma Bhagat and Abhijit Sinha from Project DEFY in Bangalore visited Helsinki to take part in the HundrED innovation summit. Owen Kelly met them in the cafe in Kiasma, Helsinki’s modern ar…