This is a little part of a draft section of my PhD thesis.  It examines Creative People and Places, particularly, their People, Place, Power: Increasing Arts Engagement conference, suggesting empowerment may not be all it's cracked up to be, especially when 'delivered' by state-sanctioned, instrumentalising arts organisations and artists - the foot soldiers of state social art provision...

This is a short response to my experience of taking part in Tabloid for the Oppressed, an invite-only event that was part of the Hidden Civil War programme at the Newbridge Project in Newcastle upon Tyne.  A critical reflection not about the aims of the event but rather about the strange feeling I got when I realised I was at an arts event about 'the oppressed' at which the participants were almost 100% white, where there were more men than women, where the presenters were all men, where most people there were from a certain class and possessed higher-than-normal levels of cultural capital.

I recently walked around Robin Hood Gardens in the company of Rab Harling and Adam Greenfield as part of my ongoing research into gentrification and acts of resistance.  These are my reflections...

I wrote a short blog post for the lovely people at Balfron Social Club.  Here's an embedded version.  Check out their site for loads more brilliant writing and information about Balfron Tower.

This blog post is a first draft of a spoken word performance script as yet unperformed. It is inspired by a ludicrous reference in this blog about the ludicrous forced adoption of Quality Metrics by Arts Council England.  Simon Mellor is their Executive Director.  He makes rather odd reference to Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party (1957), a play that is, of course, all about the killing of individuality, of an individual at the hands of Kafkaesque state conformity; about conformist brainwashing and execution.  The agents of the state in The Birthday Party are McCann and Goldberg.  I imagine a conversation between these two agents of the "hard" state and Simon (Mellor), a representative of culture, or state "soft" power.  Webber (also referred to as Stanley) is the unfortunate recipient of an incessant barrage of state-sanctioned pressure to comply, to conform.  Petey is an old man: quiet but also considerate.

All words are quotes from either Simon Mellor's blog or from he Birthday Party script.

The performance would be interspersed with propaganda images from Arts Council England's website...

This is my first article for The Guardian Comment is Free section.  I've added my own pic here...

It's a response to Matt Hancock's recent maiden speech about UK arts and culture in which he said, "The hipster is a capitalist."

I'd love your feedback...

Always Outsiders is about playing and experiencing the presence of people, environment, nature.  It is a reflective piece about two pieces of cooperative work: amb ith Lee Mattinson; and orthernGame with Stevie Ronnie.  Both pieces are set in the North Pennines in South West Northumberland, an area I made home for almost eight years.  A space in which my wife and I often found a solace of sorts from the city.  A place where our children first set foot in the world; where they were immersed in nature.

The full title of my paper is the deliberately clunky, lways Outsiders: Map-less Social Sractice Art in the Ancient Landscape of a Global Geopark.  It attempts to fuse theory with practice, practice with theory.  Thought and unthought experiences are proposed as mediators.

This blog post includes my Royal Geographical Society 2016 Conference paper as well as links to the presentation and a PDF version of the paper for printing.

Smelt.  Clart.  Pitch.  Clay.  Pit.  Hit.  Bray.  Hob.  Hoy.  Words overheard on map-less meanders over still-chartered grouse moors.  Stories told and retold by blazing public house firesides.  Cautionary tales.

This is the abstract for my forthcoming paper presentation at the Royal Geographical Society 2016 International Conference in London on 2nd September.  The session is explores "The Nexus of Art and Geography: practice as research", is part of the Participatory Geographies Research Group activities and is convened by Cara Courage (University of Brighton, UK) and Anita McKeown (Independent Researcher).

Everyone has the right and freedom to a home, don’t they?  And yet, so many people are homeless in the UK, in Europe, across the entire planet; displaced by war, oppression, climate change and the imperialistic march of global capitalism.  The United Nations are concerned: deeply concerned.

heresa Easton's superb new book explores housing crises and homelessness.  She kindly asked me to write the introduction.  Here's the draft published with the author's permission.