Luke Dickens

Pictures on walls? Producing, pricing and collecting the street art screen print

When graffiti writing was transferred onto canvas for sale during the Manhattan art boom of the 1980s, it was widely felt to have ‘sold out’ to the exploitative interests of the art establishment and become a ‘post‐graffiti’ art movement. In contrast, recent British street art demonstrates the capacity to be both more critical and complicit in the influential spheres of art and commerce. Yet, despite growing recognition of these ‘new directions in graffiti art’, there remains little critical attention to how such post‐graffiti aesthetic practices are mobilized, not simply by the heroic tactics of the lone male street artist, but by a significant body of cultural intermediaries, institutions and firms. Established in 2002 by the notorious street artist, Banksy, and his agent, the photographer Steve Lazarides, Pictures on Walls Ltd (POW) was a company that in many ways stood at the cutting edge of these developments. As such, it serves as a rich case study of the ways street art can be understood as a sophisticated form of creative industry. Specifically, as a key way of buying into the street art scene, the limited edition POW screen print is used here to exemplify a cultural economy that is both rooted in the contemporary city, and poised at an intersection between the urban and the virtual. Following the printing, pricing and collecting of such products, this research traces street art from its production in the fashionable art district of Hoxton, east London, and into the everyday lives of a passionate group of Internet collectors and fans.

News in the community?: Investigating emerging inter-local spaces of news production/consumption

This article examines the emergence of new, inter-local spaces of news production and consumption, drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews with community reporters trained by a community reporter organisation based in the north of England. Practices of news production and content generation are focused on peoples own communities and they are underpinned by an ethos of production, which is grounded in a critical consumption of news and collective processes of skill acquisition. Through an analysis of motivations and practices, we account for the values that sustain community reporter communities and discuss how such practices, while emerging from the place of local community, also extend across wider communities of interest. It is suggested that an evolving practice of skill sharing and mutual recognition could potentially stimulate the regrowth of democratic values.

Constructing a digital storycircle: digital infrastructure and mutual recognition

Building on the principles of the digital storytelling movement, this article asks whether the narrative exchange within the ‘storycircles’ of storymakers created in face-to-face workshops can be further replicated by drawing on digital infrastructure in specific ways. It addresses this question by reporting on the successes and limitations of a five-stream project of funded action research with partners in north-west England that explored the contribution of digital infrastructure to processes of narrative exchange and the wider processes of mutual recognition that flow from narrative exchange. Three main dimensions of a digital storycircle are explored: multiplications, spatializations (or the building of narratives around sets of individual narratives), and habits of mutual recognition. Limitations relate to the factors of time, and levels of digital development and basic digital access.

Spatial Dislocation and Affective Displacement: Youth Perspectives on Gentrification in London

Analyses of contemporary processes of gentrification have been primarily produced from adult perspectives with little focus on how age affects or mediates urban change. However, in analysing young people’s responses to transformations in their neighbourhood we argue that there is evidence for a more complex relationship between ‘gentrifiers’ and residents than existing arguments of antagonism or tolerance would suggest. Using a participatory video methodology to document experiences of gentrification in the east London borough of Hackney, we found that young people involved in this study experienced their transforming city through processes of spatial dislocation and affective displacement. The former incorporated a sense of disorientation in the temporal disjunctions of the speed of change, while the latter invoked the embodiment of a sense of not belonging generated within classed and intercultural interactions. However, there are expressions of ambivalence rather than straightforward rejection. Benefits of gentrification were noted including conditions of alterity and the possibility to transcend normative behaviours that they found uncomfortable. Young people demonstrated the capacity to re-imagine their relationship with the complex spaces they call home. The findings suggest a need to reframe debates on gentrification to include a more nuanced understanding of its differential impact on young people.

Becoming musicians: situating young people’s experiences of musical learning between formal, informal and non-formal spheres

This article considers the processes of musical learning that take place across formal, non-formal and informal contexts and spaces. Building on notions of embodied knowledge, identity and culture within education studies, specifically the concept of ‘musical habitus’, this article explores processes of access, inclusion and appropriation of music learning environments. Based on focus group discussions with a diverse group of young Londoners (aged 16–25 years) taking part in Wired4Music, a publicly funded youth leadership programme, the article considers definitions and the significance of music and learning places to these emerging musicians. This includes the processes through which musical learning takes place and the relevant factors that contribute to productive learning. Often operating within a context of subsidised arts provision, these perspectives are also considered within the current cultural policy landscape in England. Participants described implicit and explicit processes of exclusion to some formal music education settings and approaches, whereby a less formal though still intentional approach to learning was enacted in response. This included re-appropriating spaces and creating music in communities of practice, embracing multi-modal approaches to learning across art forms and genres and self-directing learning opportunities. These findings strongly resonate with studies which have critically appraised the specific sites and spaces where education takes place, as well as those suggesting that theories of identity, taste and cultural consumption should also be considered in education praxis, whether formal, non-formal or informal.

Rehearsal spaces as children's spaces? Considering the place of non-formal music education

This chapter contributes to research on the geographies of informal education through a focus on a model of non-formal music education advanced by the work of the National Foundation for Youth Music (Youth Music), a charity working with children and young people in England. Significantly, while this model differs from formal music education in its concern for musical learning beyond the school curriculum (generally considered as formal music education), it also differs from many of the current theoretical descriptions of informal education, which tend to focus on unstructured activity occurring in and around formal contexts of school or work (Coffield, 2000; Bekerman et al., 2005), or ad hoc ways in everyday life (Richardson and Wolfe, 2001). Despite being implemented within highly organised national and regional infrastructures by a range of third, public and private sector partners, and impacting on the lives of many thousands of children and young people each year in England alone (Lonie and Dickens, 2011), the role of such non-formal educational provision is yet to be fully taken into account within a renewed interest in the geographies of childhood, learning and education (Hanson Thiem, 2009; Holloway et al., 2010).

Are You Listening? Voicing What Matters in Non-Formal Music Education Policy and Practice

This chapter focuses on how policies of youth voice and participation are enacted within music projects seeking to develop young people’s emotional literacy and provide platforms for them to be heard. It begins with a discussion of the policy structures relating to participatory arts, strategies of inclusion and social learning in the non-formal education sector, and notions of access to cultural opportunities as adopted by Arts Council England (ACE). Within this policy context, a tension is identified whereby the generally more open, inclusive and universal understandings of cultural production within the aims of youth participation — discussed here as a form of cultural democracy — are challenged by a dominant discourse within arts policy in England, which appears to focus on creating access to, and learning from, predetermined ‘great art’, or what might be seen as the democratisation of (high) culture. This is associated with a further, long-standing tension between an intrinsic view of the benefits of participating in ‘art for art’s sake’ and a more instrumental view of art as providing a ‘vehicle’ for broader development (see Rimmer, 2009 for a detailed discussion of these issues in relation to young people’s musical participation). However, it appears that the overarching discourse that participation in apparently ‘great art’ can somehow be redemptive (i.e. an elitist instrumentalism) is creeping back into policy frameworks at the same time as participatory and culturally democratic aims are being operationalised.