Participatory Arts and Civic Engagement
The Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics is celebrating its first major research grant. The ‘Participatory Arts and Active Citizenship’ project will work with the local Sheffield-based charity ‘Art in the Park’ to examine the potential of arts-based community projects to promote political re-engagement amongst young people. The research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of its broader Cultural Value Programme and will be accompanied by the making of a documentary.
Professor Flinders, Director of the Crick Centre, noted, ‘This is a wonderful project for the Crick Centre. It combines research with outreach in ways that are both creative and original. It also plugs the Crick Centre into a national programme of projects that each in their own ways seek to engage with different communities in different ways’.
Luisa Golob, Chief Executive of ‘Art in the Park’, notes ‘The whole mission of Art in the Park is to ignite imaginations by increasing access to high quality creative activities and working with the Crick Centre on this project allows us to combine artistic passion with intellectual energy’.
The innovative and distinctive element of this initiative is that the Crick Centre will have a strong external focus that balances its internal focus on the production of world-class research. The day-to-day work of the centre and its management structure will therefore be based upon a research-based foundation that sustains three work-pillars that, in turn, serve to mutually sustain and inform the research foundation – a virtuous research-cycle (see Table 1).
Table 1 Crick Centre: Core Activities
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PILLAR 1 Research |
PILLAR 2 Engagement |
PILLAR 3 Training |
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Possible topics include:* Meta-analysis of global trends
* Studies of the politics and management of public expectations * Research into new democratic experiments * Off-line and on-line participation and inter-dependencies * What works in relation to fostering public engagement and participation |
Possible activities include:* Public debates and festivals
* Outreach and placement activities * Media engagement and broadcasting * Creating competitions or curating exhibitions * Feeding into the policy-making process through advisory committees, parliament, etc. * Research-led and partnership-based teaching with a strong skills element |
Possible topics include:* Managing the Media
* Parliamentary Engagement * Triple-Writing * Understanding Impact * ‘Talking Human’ * Pitching ideas * Public Engagement * The Politics of Impact * Writing Impact Statements * The research lifecycle
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