Dear Reader,
A warm welcome to our July bulletin. We are taking this moment to briefly reflect on our work over this last academic year and to say an enormous thank you to everyone we have worked with throughout the year. We are indebted to all of you who have so generously shared your knowledge and expertise and, in so doing, have helped us to bring to fruition so many insightful, engaging and, at times, challenging events and publications.
Over the course of this last academic year, we have been delighted to welcome hundreds of you: academics, researchers, arts professionals, artists, university professionals, funders and people from wider spheres to our events programme, much of which has focussed on Cultural Knowledge Exchange.
These have included our ‘Getting Involved’ events, several Evidence Café events and Knowledge Impacts Network events and our first NCACE Ideas Pool, which also acted as the catalyst for a number of exciting new micro-commissions. Our annual showcase, The Power of Collaborative Action: People, Place and Planet brought together around 200 people to consider how knowledge exchange and working in partnership fosters connections, creativity and innovation across a myriad of important and often interconnecting themes including: Place-making and Leveling Up, Climate Emergency and Health and Wellbeing.
We would like to thank all of you who joined us for activities over the last month, including our Knowledge Impacts Network (KIN) event, our Leadership Workshop with Clore Leadership and our day-long Culture and Collaborations on Climate Emergency event. Recordings of this and many of the year’s events can be listened to over on our SoundCloud Channel.
We are pleased to share blogs this month relating to these recent events. In Making it Count, Suzie Leighton, Co-Director of NCACE, invites written responses to issues raised in the latest KIN event, concerning how best to measure the real values of cultural knowledge exchange. Dr Laura Kemp, NCACE Senior Manager, shares a useful reflection of our climate emergency event The Climate Crisis as an opportunity for hope, connection and creativity.
NCACE Repository and Publications
This year also saw us launch the NCACE Evidence Repository, a unique and growing online resource of materials relating to knowledge exchange and collaborations between academia and the arts and cultural sectors. The repository is a space which enables any individual or institution writing about, or engaged in the development of cultural knowledge exchange activities to share their work and resources. We would love to hear from you if you would like to share any relevant reports, publications, case studies or other materials. Email: noshin@tcce.co.uk in the first instance.
NCACE Publications and Reports
We are delighted to announce our latest publication Narrating Cultural Knowledge Exchange: Stories and Perspectives from Knowledge Exchange Professionals working in Higher Education Institutions in the UK by Dr Rebekka Kill. All our previous publications can also be found in our Evidence Repository.
NCACE is a four year initiative funded by Research England and led by TCCE. Our regional hub partners are: Bath Spa University, Birmingham City University, Manchester Metropolitan University and Northumbria University.
We thank you for your readership and will be back with our next edition in September and news of some exciting new Autumn initiatives.
Evelyn Wilson (Co-Director, NCACE) and Noshin Sultan (Project and Partnerships Manager, NCACE)
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This month's blogs include: The Climate Crisis as an opportunity for hope, connection and creativity. by Dr Laura Kemp (NCACE), Making it Count: How could we be measuring the real value of our Cultural Knowledge Exchange work? by Suzie Leighton (NCACE/TCCE), Dr Astrid Breel (Bath Spa University) and Sian Brittain (Guildhall School of Music and Drama) and ‘Mary/Marianne’: An installation in development at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre by Katharina Reinthaller and Sarah Sigal.
The Climate Crisis as an opportunity for hope, connection and creativity.
The NCACE event Culture and Collaborations on Climate Emergency brought together a community of artists, poets, writers, academics, local authority officers, actors, community activists and cultural practitioners to highlight the role of collaborative initiatives with a focus on climate emergency, climate justice, net zero and community action. In the face of a panoply of seemingly insurmountable challenges, hope emerged as an unexpected yet common theme of these conversations.
Making it Count: How could we be measuring the real value of our Cultural Knowledge Exchange work?
On a sweltering day in June 2022, 50 knowledge exchange activators, curators, managers and researchers met to consider ways of measuring, valuing and reporting the impacts and outputs of cultural knowledge exchange. This informal, peer to peer discussion was held against the backdrop of recent reviews of the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF), the HE-BCI Survey, and an ongoing Review of Knowledge Exchange Funding being undertaken by Research England.
‘Mary/Marianne’: An installation in development at Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre
When we saw the callout for the Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre Fellowship, we thought it could be an opportunity to attempt something entirely different from what we’ve made before. We both work largely in theatre, as writers, directors and dramaturgs, but have an interest in experimenting with work that includes performance, but could be presented in a gallery setting. The original prompts for the 2021-2022 Fellowship were ‘recovering and resilience’, which got us thinking about how women, particularly female artists, recover and what their resilience might entail.
We are keen to hear about your collaborative projects or related works and invite you to contribute to our blog. You can read our current blog posts on our website and can access the NCACE Blog Guidelines here. For further information contact Noshin Sultan on noshin@tcce.co.uk.
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Highlights from the Evidence Repository
With over 150 free resources related to knowledge exchange and collaborations between academia and the arts and cultural sectors, there is a growing body of material across a range of different themes. This month we’re highlighting the blog Wild Tracks featured in our Environment and Climate Emergency category.
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Wild Tracks - How can the arts inform conservation? How can it help us to understand our impact on the environment, inspire us to tackle the effects of climate change? Prof Steve Waters (University of East Anglia) and a cast of stars gathered to record the first episode of his new BBC Radio 4 drama, which focuses on conservation. Visit the Evidence Repository to access other available resources.
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Over the course of the summer, we are in development mode, busy on our Autumn/Winter programme, including the NCACE Festival which will be taking place from 10 - 14 October. Details will be announced in early September.
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Given the nature of our work, NCACE is likely to be of interest and relevance to those within Higher Education (HE) research and knowledge exchange, as well as those working in the arts and cultural sector. We are also very happy to hear from other interested individuals and organisations who may be interested in our work. There is more information on how to get involved on our website.
In the meantime you can follow us on Twitter @CultureImpacts and LinkedIn for the latest NCACE news and announcements. You can also listen to recordings of past NCACE events via our SoundCloud channel. For general enquiries, get in touch with Noshin Sultan noshin@tcce.co.uk.
Image: © Bill Leslie, Leap then Look: An NCACE micro-commission 2020.
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