Ghost Homes

‘Ghost Homes’ explores the evolving sense of community in a village in rural West Wales, deeply affected by the pandemic. It looks critically at the linguistic and cultural tensions between English holidaymakers and Welsh inhabitants. Using Welsh-English code-switching, it tells the story of a mother and son on the outskirts of Cardigan, navigating illness alongside the isolating pressures of lockdown, highlighting the limitations as well as support of ‘community’. Welsh-speaking Judy is alone at the height of the pandemic, suffering from debilitating back pain. She relies on her middle-aged son, Will, with whom she has a strained relationship. The short story shows the fragile nature of ‘community’ in rural places, especially in West Wales where seaside villages have been bought up as second homes for wealthy English families and, during the pandemic, became ghost towns for the few (often elderly) individuals who continued to live there.

A Community of Councillors: Tudor Government and Prosopography

The Tudor privy council was the executive board of the English state and its members the leading political players of the era. Historians of Tudor politics have traditionally focused on kings and great men. When they deal with the privy council, they treat councillors in isolation, only exploring their links with others during moments of political strife. The result is a historiography dominated by faction and division. A prosopographical approach – a form of collective biography that helps identify the shared elements in a group’s experiences, and foregrounds the relations between its members - allows us to look at this group of men as a group, and in so doing to see them differently. Their many shared experiences - a childhood spent together at the same grammar school, a tour of Europe’s universities as young adults, joint military service, marriage into the same family, or time spent together hunting, hawking, and feasting - makes it much harder to divide councillors into neat opposing camps. More broadly, this paper uses the case-study of Tudor privy councillors to illustrate how tools taken from the Digital Humanities can enhance and expand the prosopographical approach: in particular modern relational database software moves us beyond simply identifying common themes in the lives of the members of this group, and allows us to explore patterns of interaction between them. Such an approach, moreover, has the potential to enhance our understanding of many other groups of the early modern period. ​

Ecology and Community: The Role of Community Performance in Re-telling and Enshrining Brecon’s Theatrical Heritage

This article introduces the Heritage Lottery Funded project, Brecon Little Theatre’s A Time Traveller’s Guide to Theatrical Brecon. It outlines the project and provides an overview of the process of sharing archival research through a community-led promenade performance, reflecting on the strengths of this way of working and briefly exploring how this practice might fit within the wider discourses around community, heritage and ecology.

Learning about Moss: Forming Communities of Inquiry

The term community, when applied to socially engaged projects, often encompasses a range of different motivations for people to come together. It rarely describes a harmonious group, but instead an ever-changing set of individuals, with different interests and reasons for taking part. Looking at the participatory design of a moss wall around the community garden at R-urban, in London, the paper will explore how different understandings of the term community came together through meetings, events and workshops, as a designed process of engagement. The site of the project, defined a community of location, made up of residents. The community garden wall was designed in response to the poor air quality within the area, collaborating with a community of concern, made up of activists and academics. The wall was tested through construction workshops, attracting volunteers interested in learning about DIY as well as air quality, building a diverse community of practice. These different communities came together to learn about the wall through experimental prototypes, as a community of enquiry. The paper will reflect on the success and failures of different engagement strategies to target specific groups, exploring unexpected moments of engagement and the challenges of apathy and misunderstanding. It will explore how these events enabled people to move between different understandings of the term community, through the engagement in design and the legacy of the objects produced. This has the potential to develop a longer-term collective concern for such a project and this community can in turn support behaviour change, informing an individual’s urban mobility.

Evaluating Socially Engaged Practices in Art: The Autonomy of Artists and Artworks in Community Collaborations

Issues concerning socially engaged practice, autonomy, and narrative in art are introduced alongside Claire Bishop’s critique of relational art. A conceptual framework from the community arts, the ‘Collaborative Stories Spiral’, is presented as a non-hierarchical platform for communities to develop individual and collective narratives. The framework is amended and applied to a reading of composer Brona Martin’s project Sowing Seeds, emphasising the reflective and expressive capabilities of the artist and their artwork. The article seeks to provide a necessary stimulus for better understanding how socially engaged practice may be discussed and evaluated in the community.

"In this damn country, which we hate and love”: The Pakistani-British Diaspora During the Thatcher Years in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985)

Set in Britain during the years of Margaret Thatcher’s government, Stephen Frears and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) depicts the complex formation of Pakistani-British diasporic identities in a time of rising migration levels and anti-immigrant sentiment. Thatcher and her government famously celebrated Britain’s colonial past and its legacies in an attempt to produce fixed definitions of what being British meant as a cultural and national identity marker. As such distinctions of Britishness and non-Britishness determined who was believed to belong and who was not, Britain exercised what Jacques Derrida calls ‘conditional hospitality’ (2000): creating an environment which accepts those who it considers ‘British’ enough and rejects those who do not fulfil the dominant notion of Britishness. Due to this political climate, the Pakistani characters’ relationships with ‘Britishness’ are represented as fraught, ambivalent, and in some cases, characters reject Thatcherite ideas of Britishness all together. In the film, the experiences of Pakistani characters — Nasser, Hussain, and Omar — demonstrate that to obtain agency in Britain, some Pakistani subjects had no choice but to work within the system that oppressed them. This paper examines how the three characters individually resist imperial discourse and explores the ways in which My Beautiful Laundrette shows the impact of Thatcher’s speeches on Britishness on the Pakistani-British diaspora during her premiership.

From Offline to Online Imagined Community: Recuperating Asante Culture and History for Development in Ghana

Since the advent of social media, mediated through smartphones, about a decade ago in Ghana, West Africa, many of the youths have appropriated this modern communicative technology to rejuvenate indigenous cultures as important models for fashioning the pathways of development. About half a decade ago, some young men and women of Asante origin in Ghana embarked on a project of recuperating Asante cultures. These youths saw themselves as responding to the national call, since the mid-2000s, for re-traditionalisation. It was also partly a response to the United Nations’ call for alternative development narrative, framed around cultural revivalism, since the 1990s. It equally dovetails with the call of Thabo Mbeki, former president of South Africa, for African Renaissance. Given this continental and trans-continental contexts and the recent coronavirus protocol of social distancing, a group of Asante youth aligned themselves with their chiefs and cultural historians to establish an online community on WhatsApp. Their aim was/is to recuperate the Asante Kotoko Society, which was first established as an offline Society in 1916, to support Asanteman’s progress. Thus, this online imagined community has been established to serve as a point of confluence for the teaching, researching, and promoting “relevant” Asante cultures to ensure the socio-economic development of Asanteman and Ghana. Using critical discourse analysis and ethnographic technique of in-depth interviews with key respondents of the Society, I contribute to the discourse on community as I analyse the question: How relevant is online community to offline development?