Watch………

Selma James

Selma James speaking about Women, Race and Class. She is still one of the most important thinker, speaker and activist on politics today. Selma asks; where has the women’s movement gone wrong, why is it women are more interested in using the movement to pursue their careers and what can we do about it. Join her at the Mary Quaile Day on 21 March in Manchester see

Listen

to Lisa McKenzie, author of “Getting By Estates, Class and Culture in Austerity Britain”. 26th March 2015 from 6pm. She lived on the St.Ann’s Estate in Nottingham for twenty years and is in a good position to show how her neighbourhood has been affected by government policies and economic changes, much of it for the worst. Her book is unique because she is not from a middleclass privileged background, unlike many of the writers who have…

Warwick University will be hosting an International Symposium on 17-18 September 2015 entitled ‘Amateur Creativity: Inter-disciplinary Perspectives’.

I’m presenting a paper at this event that emerges from the work with communities in Birmingham and Salford entitled:

‘A gallery of the gutter? What becomes of amateur art and artists?’

Here’s the abstract:

Over the last two decades, UK cultural policy has authorized an army of cultural intermediaries to work with ‘communities’. Amongst their many aims, they have sought to engage the ‘hard to reach’ as participants in the cultural ecology, both as consumers and potential producers. Thus, professionals have engaged communities to share in the production of creative projects and to develop their own voices and aesthetic responses to the world. As as a result of the nurturing of amateur skills and aesthetic ideas, community spaces boast exhibitions of the work of local people or their ideas and efforts adorn public…

Hey all,

You may have heard of the movement Hollaback! Or Everyday Sexism? These sites encourage people to share their stories of street harassment and daily incidences of sexism from small to huge.

The theme of Stirred Poetry next Monday is Shout. This March, month of International Women’s Day, we wanted to think about the theme of women’s voices breaking through the silence that has oppressed them for so many centuries, in so many cultures, and is still deeply embedded in the world we live in today.

The workshop was themed on Holler, we looked at the way women’s voices are heard when they are raised in protest or anger, or even debate. Here is Beyonce (yep) trying to get the word ‘bossy’ banned, because when applied to women who are leading or challenging, it puts them down, shuts them up, tells them that they should be passive…

“It’s better than the normal trade fairs I go to!”

Not being in ‘the industry’ I managed to bag a ticket for the National Restaurant and Bar Show as an out and out blagger/hanger on. It seemed to work, I was let in and left free to roam around the architectural hangar of Manchester’s great central building without anyone seeming to mind. Within minutes I was slurping a half of JW Lees Manchester Pale Ale, and it was free! I could get used to this.

The NRB was held across two days March. It was a smorgasbord, a collection, a veritable phalanx of professional outfits looking to win more business in our wonderful world of restaurants and bars. If you’ve ever wondered who it is who supplies those comedy salt cellars, or the gaudy menus, or the neat waitress uniforms, then this is the place you needed to be. It…

Watch

…Nowhere is Home..(watch on BBC IPlayer) Dexys film of their latest show. Totally eccentric, brilliantly brainy Kevin Rowland is one of my heroes. In Dexys Midnight Runners in the 70s he espoused the working class intellectual viewpoint dressed in his donkey jacket and hat. With songs such as Dance Stance he snarled at the people who were anti-Irish. From an Irish Birmingham background he challenged all the stereotypes of what it meant to be Irish. In his latest album “Nowhere is Home” he is still chewing over his identity. Enjoy it at

Oppose racist prisons

…….you might have seen the footage on Channel 4 about the shocking behaviour of the prison authorities to asylum seekers see .
They are not going to put up with it anymore, many of them are on hunger strike. Send them a message of support to detainedvoices@riseup.net.

Find out about

…“These…

Last Friday, we were delighted to welcome an Easter Island statue to Manchester Museum as part of our Making Monuments on Rapa Nui exhibition which opens on the 1st of April. The statue is on loan from the British Museum.

It’s a giant piece of beautiful basalt. Here’s Bryan Sitch, our Curator of Archaeology talking about its arrival: