About this Event
How can the arts assist in supporting learning economies that empower fulfilling, ecological, ethical thriving? In 2023-2024 the Centre for Arts and Learning has focused research events and projects on Arts Economies. On 8 May 2024 CAL is teaming up with ICCE to bring vital issues into discussion for diverse, inclusive and innovative economics. Speakers work in higher education, creative industries and beyond, to enable alternative and beneficial cultural balancing of growth with sustainability.
Speakers include David Rousell and Kelly Hussey-Smith (RMIT Australia); Ragupathy Venkatachalam, Institute of Management Studies, Goldsmiths; Melina Michael – artist and curator; Siân Prime and Adrian de La Court, ICCE, Goldsmiths and Dave O’Brien, University of Manchester.
Arts Economies Symposium is in-person at Goldsmiths University of London and online
David Rousell and Kelley Hussey-Smith, RMIT Australia
An archipelago of learning events: Making urban histories and futures through the Local Alternatives platform
Local Alternatives is a collaborative network and creative platform for re-imagining urban histories and futures with children and young people. Since 2017 the platform has seeded more than 16 creative research projects responding to the political, social, and environmental concerns of children and young people in cities across Europe, North America, and Australia (www.localalternatives.org). These projects have led to exhibitions, immersive installations, and interventions co-produced with children and young people in galleries, museums, schools, universities, and community spaces. While each of the projects has followed its own situated urgencies, emergent questions, and local variations, they have also generated complex relays and zones of intermixture across and between locations.
This talk navigates a series of learning events from recent projects in the company of three philosophical concepts: the archipelago, micropolitics, and the anarchive. Édouard Glissant’s (1991; 1997) archipelagic thinking offers an entry point into the study of emplaced learning events as a string of islands cast across the depths of sea. Each event is seen to configure histories in novel ways by producing new and different readings of the world-city (‘tout-monde’) from the traces and fragments of submerged memory. We turn to micropolitics in an attempt to gather the affective force of learning events that overspill macropolitical categories of subjectivity and representation (Guattari, 1995; Rolnik, 2017; 2023). Lastly, we consider child and youth practices of anarchiving as a speculative aesthetics capable of re-investing the affective remainder or ‘surplus value’ of events into alternative histories and futures (Manning, 2020; Massumi, 2015). This leads us to propose a modest contribution to re-conceptualising partnerships of non-transactional exchange within and beyond the neo-liberal political economy of the contemporary university and city.
Biographies
David Rousell is an artist, researcher, and writer working on unceded lands of the Kulin Nation in Naarm (Melbourne). He co-directs the Creative Agency Lab for transdisciplinary studies of creativity at RMIT University and is a founding member of the Local Alternatives platform. David’s research focuses on collectively re-imagining educational cultures and environments through creative means. This often involves long-term, place-based collaborations with children, young people, and communities in response to social and environmental issues that matter to them. Current work focuses on young people as historians and futurists of urban life under conditions of climate change, political unrest, and the urgencies of decolonising public archives and institutions.
Kelly Hussey-Smith is a creative researcher focused on photography as a social practice and art education. She lives and works across Wurundjeri Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung Country in Naarm (Melbourne) where she is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art at RMIT University. She is a member of the informal collective ‘Doing Visual Politics’—a group of artists, curators, archivists, organisers and photographers working through questions of relational ethics, co-creation and representation.
Ragupathy Venkatachalam, Professor of Economics, Goldsmiths UoL
Resemblances and disjunctions: Economic Modelling Through the Lens of Art
The relationship between economic theory and the world of art is not immediately obvious. The former, often dubbed a dismal science, broadly deals with questions related to the creation and distribution of wealth through various modes of production, consumption and exchange. Art, on the other hand, is perceived to be the realm of the creative, expressing a wide range of ideas, skills, imagination and constantly challenging established boundaries. This talk will attempt to explore possible connections between some forms of art and economic modelling. Synthesising common insights across selected works of René Magritte and M.C. Escher, it explores the relevance of artistic imagination to understand aspects of mathematical modeling in economics. It argues for a more prominent recognition of the relatively unsung virtue of modeling: to highlight paradoxes and impossibilities.
Biography
Ragupathy Venkatachalam is a Professor of Economics at the Institute of Management Studies, Goldsmiths. His research interests span across different disciplines and lie broadly at the intersection of economic theory, computation and human behaviour. He has published his research in areas that include Computable Economics, Macroeconomic Dynamics, Behavioural Economics, History/Methodology of Economics, and Discrimination.
Dave O'Brien, Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries, University of Manchester
"Can education break the class ceiling in the arts?"
Inequalities are well known, and well entrenched in the creative sector. This is true of both the cultural workforce and the cultural audience. A huge range of literature demonstrates the fact that arts and culture are highly exclusive. The recent Creative Majority report suggested 'what works' insights for hiring and commissioning in the workforce. It also identified a range of issues that go beyond who is hired and who is commissioned. This talk considers one part of the follow up to that research- the Making the Creative Majority report on access to creative education- as part of understanding and challenging inequalities. In doing so, the talk connects current debates on arts education to broader questions of social mobility and class inequality in the arts.
Biography
Dave O'Brien is Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester. He has written extensively on key issues in the cultural and creative economy. These include the use of culture in urban regeneration, how policymakers use evidence, the stratification of cultural consumption, and inequalities in cultural work. He is the co-author of Culture is bad for you, the Panic! report, the Creative Majority and the Making the Creative Majority reports. He has twice been an advisor to the House of Commons’ Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee inquiries, and is currently on a research secondment to the UK's Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
m/blueprintpodcasts/ [instagram.com]
Winner: Inclusive Enterprise Education Award
Winner: People’s Choice Award: National Enterprise Educators
Arts Economies Symposium May 8 14.00-19.00, Schedule
Co-convened by Centre for Arts and Learning (CAL) and Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship (ICCE)
14.00 – 14.30 CAL and ICCE Introduction - Miranda Matthews and Sian Prime
14.30-15.30 David Rousell and Kelly Hussey-Smith
15.30- 15.45 Break
15.45-16.15 Ragupathy Venkatachalam
16.15-16.45 Melina Michael
16.45-17.00 Break
17.00-17.30 Siân Prime and Adrian de la Court
17.30-18.00 Round Table
18.00-19.00 Dave O’Brien
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Goldsmiths, University of London, 8 Lewisham Way, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
