Stephen Pritchard
Stephen Pritchard is a final-year PhD researcher at Northumbria University exploring how activist art and radical social praxis might create spaces for acts of resistance and liberation. The research particularly focuses on interventions which support movements that oppose gentrification, displacement and corporate capitalism and seek creative new approaches to developing radical socialist democracies. His work is deeply rooted in critical theory. His deeply intradisciplinary approach spans urban geography, aesthetics, politics and political theory, cultural policy, economics, decolonisation and border thinking, psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theories, sociology, and visual and material cultures.
He has lectured and presented widely including at the Royal Geographical Society Conference 2016, the Association of American Geographers 2016 Conference in San Francisco, Durham University, the University of Warwick, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts and Arts Council England National Office. He was one of a panel of academics consulted in the production of Everyday Creativity: From Great Art and Culture for Everyone to Great Arts and Culture by, with and for Everyone, a radical proposal for rethinking cultural policy for Arts Council England. He also a published academic and an established blogger. Stephen has recently completed his first commission for The Guardian newspaper: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/hipsters-artists-gentrifying-capitalism.
Stephen is also a Senior Research Assistant in Arts and Humanities at Northumbria University, director of the community arts collective dot to dot active arts, community arts practitioner and activist.
Supervisors: Ysanne Holt
Phone: 07949776566
Address: Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom
He has lectured and presented widely including at the Royal Geographical Society Conference 2016, the Association of American Geographers 2016 Conference in San Francisco, Durham University, the University of Warwick, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Arts and Arts Council England National Office. He was one of a panel of academics consulted in the production of Everyday Creativity: From Great Art and Culture for Everyone to Great Arts and Culture by, with and for Everyone, a radical proposal for rethinking cultural policy for Arts Council England. He also a published academic and an established blogger. Stephen has recently completed his first commission for The Guardian newspaper: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/hipsters-artists-gentrifying-capitalism.
Stephen is also a Senior Research Assistant in Arts and Humanities at Northumbria University, director of the community arts collective dot to dot active arts, community arts practitioner and activist.
Supervisors: Ysanne Holt
Phone: 07949776566
Address: Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom
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Papers by Stephen Pritchard
Gamekeepers police the palatial borders of the classical-traditional-fine arts; the gated-estates of the commercial arts monitored by drones. Outreach and public engagement programmes: TOKENISTIC attempts to play the incredibly duplicitous democratisation of culture game. THEY do not want US to be part of THEIR Art! Never have. Never will.
But some (perhaps many) socially engaged artists do not wish to engage in creative placemaking’s global dystopian ‘dreamscapes’ nor in falsely democratic community ‘re-imaginings’ where state/developer always get their way. Artists in the US, UK and other countries are beginning to question why should ‘we’ want to ‘make’ a place for ‘them’. Don’t places already exist; already have communities? Who are ‘we’ to become embroiled in the sinister depths of urban planning, some artists wonder. Increasingly, socially engaged artists are, true to their roots, standing in support of those threatened with rehousing - against vested interests; taking direct action with people against place-makers; guarding complex community cultures and their existing ways of living.
environs. The approach is always grassroots. Never idyllic; no dystopias
either. Just meeting people where they like to gather and doing what they
like to do.
Gamekeepers police the palatial borders of the classical-traditional-fine arts; the gated-estates of the commercial arts monitored by drones. Outreach and public engagement programmes: TOKENISTIC attempts to play the incredibly duplicitous democratisation of culture game. THEY do not want US to be part of THEIR Art! Never have. Never will.
But some (perhaps many) socially engaged artists do not wish to engage in creative placemaking’s global dystopian ‘dreamscapes’ nor in falsely democratic community ‘re-imaginings’ where state/developer always get their way. Artists in the US, UK and other countries are beginning to question why should ‘we’ want to ‘make’ a place for ‘them’. Don’t places already exist; already have communities? Who are ‘we’ to become embroiled in the sinister depths of urban planning, some artists wonder. Increasingly, socially engaged artists are, true to their roots, standing in support of those threatened with rehousing - against vested interests; taking direct action with people against place-makers; guarding complex community cultures and their existing ways of living.
environs. The approach is always grassroots. Never idyllic; no dystopias
either. Just meeting people where they like to gather and doing what they
like to do.