Talking creative and culture | The University of Manchester

Talking creative and culture: Manchester’s “anthropological soup”

Professor John McAuliffe, Professor Caroline Bithell and Keisha Thompson discuss Manchester’s role as a thriving hub of creativity and culture – and how we can protect it moving forward.

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Hello and welcome to Talk 200, a lecture and podcast series to celebrate The University of Manchester's bicentenary year.

Our 200th anniversary is a time to celebrate 200 years of learning, innovation and research. 200 years of our incredible people and community, 200 years of global influence.

In this series, we'll be hearing from some of the nation's foremost scientists, thinkers and social commentators, plus many other voices from across our university community, as we explore the big topics affecting us all.

In this episode, we're exploring Manchester's vibrant cultural landscape and its symbiotic relationship with our university. From the Industrial Revolution to its metamorphosis into a modern hub of creativity, Manchester has established a rich cultural environment.

We'll talk about how the University's initiatives are fostering a culture that is accessible to all.

We'll hear how interdisciplinary collaborations are supporting art within marginalised communities and discuss the ways in which the creative industries support economic growth, enrich civic life and enhance wellbeing.

Let's discover the stories behind the cultural institutions that made Manchester Manchester and uncover the creative spirit of the city.

My name is John McAuliffe, I'm a poet and I'm a Professor of Poetry here at The University of Manchester.

I also work at the publisher, Carcanet, which is an independent poetry press and I run Creative Manchester, which puts together interdisciplinary research projects from all the disciplines across the University which have an element of creative practice in them.

I'm Caroline Bithell, I'm Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Music Department here at the University, and I'm just putting the finishing touches to a book about traditional music and dance in Georgia, that is Georgia in the Caucasus.

And I've also been working on different projects together with colleagues from Health Sciences and Manchester Camerata, that's all around their work on music and dementia.

I'm Keisha Thompson, I'm currently an Innovation Fellow, I'm formerly the Artistic Director of Contact Theatre. I'm also known as just a freelance artist, writer, performer, facilitator, also Co-Chair of the Independent Theatre Council and a Trustee for Olympia's Music Foundation.

So, can we start talking about the history of the University and how culture may be has evolved from the early days?

Sure, one of the stories I like to tell about the University is that 200 years ago is the start date, but it's a cluster of different institutions and in some way there still is a cluster of different institutions, many of which come from the city, others come from national or from international research interests or who will have principal investigators, professors who drive research in different ways through them.

But one of the great stories I suppose about culture is the University settlement in the 1890s when the University was trying to think about how it related to the town.

They set up a house and they put their very first social scientists in the UK, working in Ancoats, and co-producing projects as we'd say now, and setting questions with the women and the children and the men who were working in the mills in that part of the city.

And one of the really interesting things about that is, one of the drivers; a woman called Esther Roper; who was very involved in a lot of the suffragette movements in the 1890s, and is, we think, probably the first working-class woman to graduate with a degree in this country. She worked there with a woman called Eva Gore-Booth.

But Eva Gore-Booth is much better known as a poet than she is as an activist, but you have this kind of combination of people who are publishing books while also working in the heart of the city and thinking about political change, even as they're trying to imagine different futures in their creative work.

So I think that university settlement in Ancoats was a really groundbreaking way of doing things.

There was something similar in London with Toynbee House, where you have this kind of model of the university responding to what's happening around it, which speaks to a lot of the best activity still that the university does.

Well, I think we could talk a lot about how ideas about culture have changed in more recent times. So, in the past culture might have meant high culture, high art, it might also have meant other cultures.

Whereas, in Manchester today, we're so much aware of the very many different layers and dimensions of popular culture and that also goes back in history. There have been such diverse populations in Manchester and, in terms of music, they've all had their own music cultures that they've brought with them.

In the past we might think about the broadside ballads that were in the context of the Industrial Revolution; where people would just make up songs about current events, current issues, and they'd sell them for a penny on the streets. You just needed the words because you would sing it to a popular tune.

So, I like imagining what everyday culture might have been like in the past on the streets of Manchester.

And these are also things that we're now interested in studying. They're quite legitimate objects of study alongside Beethoven, which Manchester is also a powerhouse for the research of.

So the city itself then, becomes part of the field in which we work as educators, as researchers, and it allows us to make relatively easy connections today with living, music making, living culture, different people who are out there making life, and being creative in their own ways.

Just tapping into what we were saying, it just seems like that fluidity between academia, intellectual conversation activity, culture, being political, that's always been there from my sense, growing up as a Mancunian.

It’s felt inseparable, that history and that understanding of how you make culture, what you even do that for.

That's always felt like it's been a political act to be creative as well. My understanding of it when I was growing up, learning about various artists and meeting artists, and then being encouraged to write and create material myself.

And then, as I've dialled further into being more academic, I've been encouraged to bring my creativity and my understanding of culture along with me and what I enjoy is when you learn about figures or movements and you see how instrumental it is to have these cultural appendages, let’s say.

If we're going to go back to talking about suffragettes or the suffragists, I really enjoyed learning that they were the first political movements to come up with colours being attached to their statement, to the sash. The white, purple, green; that was them, and then followed Labour attaching themselves to red, and Conservative, attaching themselves to blue and things like that. So you're like, “Ok, well that's useful…”

I didn’t know that.

“…that's very impactful.”

John, any discussion of culture and The University of Manchester, we should talk about Creative Manchester, shouldn't we? The platform – can you go into some detail on that?

So Creative Manchester was the University's response, I suppose, to try to think about what it is to be situated in the city where creative industries are playing (as you well know Andy) a bigger part in the economy of the city, as well as in the daily life and night-time activity of people who live in Manchester.

So we just mapped research, which had a creative element in it, trying to figure out how many researchers there might be, whose work would touch on this. There were hundreds of researchers who were grouped around placemaking and thinking about civic responsibilities and civic futures.

Then creative industries and innovation more broadly, which might look at publishers, festival economy, venues, people working in the games industry, advertising and marketing, and that huge chunk of work, which has grown so much here.

I suppose what's really interesting about it for us is that we're putting together, say, architects and engineers alongside social scientists and composers, trying to think about urban space and different ways they might think about it. We’re framing projects that think critically about what could work better in terms of urban space for the communities who live there, or we might be putting together professors of nursing, some life science collaborators and then writers, thinking about what they might have in common to attack a research problem, which is pressing for the city.

So, Creative Manchester convenes these interdisciplinary research teams, then goes out and finds funding to support the work they might do to answer research questions.

We’ve also linked with our partners in the city. Whether it’s with the theatres, orchestras, or festivals (people that we have kind of long standing, piecemeal relationships), we're beginning to put them together a bit more regularly with the research that's going on here.

I think, quite relevant to that, is Keisha’s project.

You recently worked on bringing together a creative response to, I believe, gene editing techniques.

Can you just talk to us a little bit about that?

Yeah, so I worked with Jerome De Groot from the University and we managed to get some funding from The University of Manchester and from Lancaster University to support the next iteration of this script that I've been working on for the past four years called ‘The Bell Curves’. I just got intrigued by Jennifer Doudner and Emmanuel Charpentier, and their development of CRISPR-Cas9 technology and what it means for gene editing, and all the medical ethics attached to that.

But immediately I knew that from my position as someone who is an enthusiast for science, but it's not my expertise, I was like: “Ok, how can I engage with this topic? How can I make it a creative provocation but allow people to access this information and understand that this is a thing that's happening in the world?”

Because whenever I started to speak to people about it, they were like: “Have you made this up?”, and I was like: “No, it's real, there's a TED talk, it's happening”, and it can have such an impact on people's lives genuinely and make changes for marginalised groups that I was like, this can't be happening in silos, it's bizarre to me.

So I just put myself in a position where I could create a piece of work and it's just been a joy to work on it because as well as creating a script and sharing it with people and being interrogated by scientists and pushing myself as a creative.

I know you know quite a bit about the Manchester Camerata and University of Manchester collaboration of music in mind.

Yeah.

Could you just explain a little bit about that?

Sure, yes.

So, the University has had a very long relationship with Manchester Camerata, particularly focusing on their music and dementia programmes. And what's interested me in becoming involved in that is that I'm particularly keen to bridge that divide between the humanities and sciences and different research methods.

We might work more on the art side with ethnography, with qualitative methods. We're interested in people's experiences, narratives of experience, and then on the scientific side, you would be measuring impacts in a more formalised, quantitative way.

It's a big question, isn't it: How to capture, when somebody says: "This has changed my life." What does that mean? And it's not just anecdotal, it's really relevant. And I think bringing those two approaches together is powerful.

You can observe those impacts in different ways. I think actually taking what people say about what it means to them, how it's affected their experience. You have to find a way of presenting that in a way that counts as data as well.

As an ethnomusicologist, I'm looking at music and culture, and we talk about it now in terms of people making music. So, I've done quite a lot of work in the past on Corsica and on the natural voice movement community choirs, and the democratisation of singing, that kind of thing.

The thing I'm working on at the moment is actually based in Georgia and the Caucasus, looking at waves of revival of traditional music and dance and how they've been affected by political developments, geopolitical developments in more recent times.

So that's really interesting, and it's like a prototype for what's going on in Georgia at the moment, for how to regenerate and make sustainable a living grassroots culture, alongside a professional performance-based music culture.

There's so much going on at the moment to do with transmitting different aspects of the heritage, whether it's music, dance, chanting in churches (that was obviously not a thing in Soviet times). Bringing all of that back, but in such a way that you re-embed it into people's everyday practice.

They're not doing it because someone's told them they should be preserving their heritage. They're doing it because it's become part of their own life again. And if we look at other parts of the world where people bemoan the loss of indigenous culture, native culture, vernacular culture, why don't people sing folks songs anymore? It seemed to be something that's anachronistic.

You might be singing about life as it was in the past for a certain sector of the population, it doesn't apply to everybody. How do you get that kind of culture alive again? It's really relevant in that sense.

And one of the interesting angles to this research is that there are now thousands of people all over the world who sing in their own countries in Georgian choirs, but none of them are Georgian. They’re all foreign, as they would be called in Georgia.

So in Manchester, we don't have a regular Georgian choir, but we sometimes have days and singers come over from Georgia and they teach songs. And a lot of these people now are finding something in Georgian multipart singing that replaces something they feel they've lost, but that they don't feel they can find in their own folk culture because of the baggage that might come with it.

That's a nice bridge, isn't it, to ‘In Place of War’, which is a 20-year-old program that emerged from the University. Could we hear about that program?

Yeah, I was just going to say tapping on to In Place of War. I know Ruth quite well, and I went to Zimbabwe with In Place of War in 2018, I think that was. So yeah, I've interacted with the organisation as well and it is a brilliant organisation.

You can't really beat going to another country and understanding how culture fits into their context and it not having that slant of charity, let's say, but it's more of just a learning and an exchange. So I really enjoyed, for example, going to Zimbabwe with Ruth and other artists and attending a hip-hop festival, for example, and we were talking about the relevance of hip-hop in that space, speaking to the political scene.

And it's so different to the way that Manchester embodies hip-hop, for example. I went there with certain things to say but then felt that they just were not relevant anymore and that was a good learning as well.

It’s a funny one, isn't it? Because in a way, the University is playing a role of validating all of that by being there and by having the project, but it's not necessarily something we've done, you know, it's no – I don't feel it's me who's made a difference.

I've recognised other people out there in the world who are making a difference, and an important thing the University can do now is to give a space, create a space, give a voice, have a conversation with all the people who are doing great things in the world without needing to claim that as impact, which we have to do.

It's an enabling role.

Yes, it is.

To create that space.

Yes.

It's incredibly more and more important to have those spaces where the University can kind of make those spaces available to other people.

We had a fantastic visit from the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, two months ago, who was awarded an honorary degree, but he studied here in the late 60s and early 70s in anthropology. He said a lot of the anthropologists were African anthropologists who were coming back to encounter, some of them with colonial administrative pasts and coming back, trying to think about those cultures completely differently. So, there was an absolutely change when the relationship between the research and those communities just turned around.

For him, who became this radical ‘firebrand’ of a politician all through the 70s, 80s and 90s, particularly interested in Latin America as it turned out, but it was completely formative of political direction. He says how vital it was for him then and how even more important it is now for universities to make these spaces where people can disagree, be invited in and make arguments, test ideas, which may not always work, get things wrong and be able to move on to the next thing.

The University of Manchester does contain a lot of the group of world class cultural institutions. Can we talk about how some of them came to be?

Yeah, so there are a lot of cultural institutions, more than almost any other university in the country, kind of big museums and galleries that have a national stature almost.

So, the Whitworth Art Gallery and Park. Whitworth was one of the founders of the University and whose building it was, and that was made over to the University and redesigned in 2014.

The Manchester Museum then, which is, home to Stan the dinosaur, which everybody who goes on a bus, past the university, can tip their hat to as they're going by. It’s part of this big investment in the cultural institutions over the last decade or so, like the big £17 million worth of building has gone into the Whitworth and the New South Asia Gallery and the China Gallery, which are just beautiful spaces, which I'm always sending my students to.

I spent so many hours with our kids going into those places because they're really family friendly as well as being research hubs for us.

And then two of the other institutions, I suppose the John Ryland's Research Institute and Library downtown, which is undergoing another renovation at the moment. It was founded by John Rylands’ widow, Enriqueta Rylands, a Cuban woman who was attached to the family initially, and then on his death, honoured him by setting up something, which is very kind of close to the spirit of the University, sort of secular library.

When you walk into the grand old reading room, you've all the pictures of Aristotle, the statues of the great literary figures where you might expect in an almost church-like atmosphere to see saints, but instead you've got learning put at the heart of what that big space is for and the huge collection there.

I suppose they think now that the initial collection she bought from the Spencer family, which has all of the Shakespeare and a lot of the Sanskrit roles in this kind of enormous collection, for probably £210 million in today's money, is what she spent on that collection. It has made it one of the great foundational and research libraries in the world.

And the other one I should mention is Jodrell Bank, which again is outside Macclesfield, almost like a hidden space for many people. We're very involved with the Bluedot festival out there, but over the years we've run so many literary events in Jodrell, kind of again, amazing new gallery space, and gardens out there.

So that might give you some sense of the range of those cultural institutions, I suppose really important to say that for us at Creative Manchester, we really use them to draw in the communities around them.

It’s a sort of a multi-generational community, so it's your scholarly community, it's got children, and then it's got the student population, but then people travel from all over the world. If you're looking at TripAdvisor's top ten things to do in Manchester, these institutions feature on it. The Museum has welcomed its millionth visitor since it's reopening.

So these are kind of amazing assets.

It's a great example of how the institutions have changed their relationship to the communities of Greater Manchester and I know Caroline, you've got other examples.

Yeah, so we could also talk about performance activity. This is the way in which we bridge a gap and make relationships between students at the University and the way in which they can be active musicians in Manchester.

So, we have loads of student ensembles and they're very independent and proactive, and they set up projects around the city, set up performances and so on.

But one particularly interesting one is a Klezmer ensemble. These are students who can enrol on an assessed module in Klezmer ensemble performance, so they do a performance that counts as an exam, but they do lots of other things around the city.

Can we describe Klezmer?

Yeah. It’s sort of associated with Jewish communities, Jewish wedding music, Yiddish music. So something that was a big revival sort of outside in the diaspora, if you like, in previous years. And it's become absorbed into folk cultures in some ways. Our own Klezmer ensemble – this work was pioneered in fact by Richard Faye, who is in the education department, but he's also a musician, a composer.

He has mentored and led this Klezmer ensemble. In fact, another thing that Richard's done, which is worth mentioning, another project that he has had, is creating a show that reimagines what would have happened if Manchester's Jewish communities in the past had met with the Irish communities and what if people from those different communities around Angel Meadow, had played music together? What would that have sounded like?

He now has shows that put together those two musical traditions in creative ways. And again, this is about reminding us of the very, very rich culture in the past, of everyday music making, the way that music was part of people's lives in Manchester, and in this case, representatives of the many dozens of very well-established populations in Manchester that have at some point come as it were from somewhere else, but they're now part of Manchester.

And that's the other great thing about being based in the city line Manchester.

I was already attached to the city very much as an artist getting established and things like that, but as I engage with people and leave the city or encounter people coming in, I just become more and more proud of the fact that there's this kind of like ‘anthropological soup’ that you can just have access to if you're from here.

Sometimes because it's so experiential, you can take it for granted. So, when you get these opportunities to step outside and have these conversations and learn about it a bit more like historically and go: "Oh, that is what I've been experiencing; That is what it means to be Mancunian; This is what it feels like to grow up in a city.” Where you genuinely feel like you're at the intersect of so many cultures and histories and understandings, it galvanises you and allows you to just travel and engage with people and cultures in a way that can't be formalised. So, it just makes me very appreciative of being Mancunian.

I just thought that Keisha staying has mattered so much to the city of Manchester as well. Three years ago, the first time a major national literary prize was held, a prize ceremony held outside of London was because Keisha brought the forward prizes for poetry and to the Contact, and it's sort of one of these amazing things sometimes about this country and just think: "That cannot be the first time."

It was the first time it had ever happened, that a major literary prize was awarded outside of London. Then the following year they went to another great northern city: Leeds. And you just feel like they could see that it worked. And they were able to do it again. So, it does really matter, that we have such great Mancunians here.

And in literature, City of Literature, festival, can you?

Yeah, so UNESCO’s Cities of Literature is a status, which was awarded in Manchester in 2017.

And in 2019, the charity was set up with Manchester City Council, our neighbours at Manchester Metropolitan University and ourselves as the three stakeholders in the organisation.

We were always outnumbered on the board by trustees from community writing organisations because UNESCO awarded us this mark of quality, which I'm wearing the little red badge for UNESCO City of Literature this morning.

Because they could see that it was a city of libraries. They could see that there were the great historic libraries. They could see there was this amazing civic library structure across the borough of Manchester.

But also, that it was a city in which literature took place in many languages, and I think that's probably one of the big changes. We’ve kind of talked about it as something which always existed, where there were always other communities but other languages here.

But the linguistic diversity collective is a research group here at the University. And it has mapped hundreds of languages and looking at all the various supplementary schools which exist, kind of, at weekends for people who want their children and family members to speak the language of their home communities as well.

And these languages are spoken every day on the streets of Manchester. I know the students are sent out with recorders as well on street corners. If they hear somebody saying something they don't understand, they're encouraged to go and ask people: “What's that?”, “Could you tell us what you were saying?” and so on.

And the UNESCO City of Literature recognises that. One of its big projects is the multilingual poets of Manchester. So there are three poets, Spanish, Urdu and Arabic language poets who represent the city.

I suppose Anjum Malik is probably the best known of those poets, a wonderful poet. Clare Wright, who writes a lot for radio as well. She responds to and works with communities especially from South Asian communities to put together work where she takes their words and turns it into poems for key occasions.

The other thing UNESCO City of Literature has done is linked the professional writers of the city. Here at the University, Jeanette Winterson was born in the city and came back. She has been working with us for nearly ten years now, and she’s just a wonderful writer, a great encourager of our students as well and a great supporter of this project.

Lemn Sissay, again, always comes back and is involved in projects with us every year to do with UNESCO City of Literature.

And then people like Ian McGuire, whose novel The North Water was turned into a big TV mini-series a couple of years ago. And many of our students who are getting up in the prize list every year. Kamila Shamsie is another.

So, there's this wealth of professional writing alongside the community of writing and the growth of publishing in the city, which is accompanied this sort of affiliation with UNESCO. So, the Hachette and others, and Manchester University Press, of course. Andy, your own publisher, who are like a cultural institution themselves at the University and who have more and more to do with Manchester in their list as well.

So UNESCO City of Literature can't take the credit for all of that, for a choice to coordinate and bring together a lot of that activity.

Well, we've been given the accolade because of the rich, fertile, creative ‘soup’ in Keisha's phrase, which is really appropriate, isn't it? Because there's so much going on and then looking forward, what are the kind of aspirations and what can listeners to this podcast look forward to?

Maybe in the next few years, coming out of the cultural output of the University and of the city.

I'm putting together a course called ‘On Creativity’ at the moment, which is looking at what creativity means in Manchester now and looking at the history of creativity. And I suppose trying to break down the idea that creativity is about individuals and that creativity actually is to do with having support systems and networks in place, and that any book is going to involve, not just a writer, but communities where that writing will get tested.

It's going to involve publishers, it's going to involve design, it's going to involve readerships and audiences as well.

It's been a tough 15 years or so in terms of funding for the sector I'm most involved in, which would be poetry, which I suppose, has always depended and does in every country in the world, which has a kind of a poetry network on some kinds of state funding and that money has either frozen or disappeared from any organisations over these last 15 years or so.

So that has diminished some of the support systems for creativity. What I'm hoping is that those support systems get galvanised and get replenished and that the brilliant people from many different backgrounds across the city, as well as those coming through the University, will be able to plug their creativity into those support systems and will be able to develop new and interesting ideas.

For us, I'd like there to be more and more publishers thinking about what it's like to be based in a second city and what the advantages of that might be and for Manchester, it’ll be taking a global lead in terms of creative industries and for more and more of our graduates not to have to take the sloping road down to the south-east but to stay here in the north-west, in Manchester and Liverpool and Leeds, and I’ll even give Yorkshire some credit, in the future. That's what I would like to see.

Can you guys get behind those aspirations?

Yeah, definitely. I was really glad that you talked about funding, John, because it's a big thing that we have to acknowledge. I think the thing that makes me feel positively about Manchester is we've already got that history of connecting outside of our sector. So, the links that we're talking about are in regard to health and creativity and culture; sport and culture there, starting to interact a bit more.

There's great opportunities with tech and we've seen gaming is a massive industry that's coming in and that already just holds, straddles that space already.

So I think we're already poised to be resilient and not reactionary but pioneering in terms of navigating this landscape that, for some reason at the moment, isn't supporting the arts from a financial point of view in the way that it should be. Even though we know that it contributes so much economically, and not even just economically, you don't have to reduce it down to that, it really allows people to be at their best selves and to be healthy citizens in the city.

I feel that the University just does a great role in demonstrating that and making that case and showing that it's possible to still engage with the arts, support the arts without that kind of... whilst we're figuring out how to fund it.

Amazingly, whilst all of that's changing and is being hijacked politically, unfortunately, I still feel quite positive that Manchester's still doing a lot and it's just so networked.

I think the anchors as well in Manchester, of the University, the other universities and the city council, we have lots of great anchors here. Things are really thriving. But it feels like in terms of music even, you've got the Hallé, the BBC, Manchester Camerata and Manchester Collective. There's just so much exciting – and the E&O coming to Manchester as well, and that's alongside so much community music.

So it's a very exciting time, you just feel that you want to make sure there's a good following wind as well, behind it.

I think it's really important to preserve and expand until they claim to different spaces for allowing everyday creativity to flourish, if you like, and that people can just be creative in some of the spaces anyway.

In terms of actual buildings, the Museum’s doing a fantastic job in having all sorts of festivals and open evenings, and you can wander around and be part of that. A lot of people go to those events in the Museum, it's amazing.

Also parks and gardens, like Hume Garden Centre, where they have fantastic little festivals and things for families and children, the parks, the outdoor spaces, pop up performances, which can happen quite spontaneously as well. I would like to see that culture really thriving where you don't have to book months in advance, and you don't necessarily need an awful lot of funding. You might need permission to perform on the street, but that's something that is then open. People can wander past, they can come in and out, and you've taken away the barriers of buying tickets, having decent clothes, walking in through the door, not quite knowing how to behave.

But one of the things that our colleagues are looking at is that the recent history, over the last 30 or 40 years, is the most fragile, in terms of how it's encoded, than any previous history. Paper is incredibly durable, and we have excellent records, but the recent past and the ways in which the machines that we have used, and the ways that we can access them and how frail and fragile that tech is means that huge amounts of the recent past have almost completely disappeared.

But Manchester is a place where we have an awful lot of interest in these machines and we've a lot of expertise in that area, so it'd be really interesting if Manchester became one of the centres for trying to think about how the digital present and recent past stays available for us and our future descendants to learn from as well.

I think that’s something the Rylands is certainly leading out on, behind the scenes, down there.

One thing that's already started is the possibility of being more active in the virtual world, which then breaks down the physical barriers of place and time to some extent.

That started in lockdown, of course. So a lot of us had the experience of moving our concerts online, moving our workshops online and just realising that people from different parts of the world, living in different time zones could be – for example, something I was researching at the time was how they could come together on Zoom and actually have a Georgian singing workshop taught by somebody in Georgia.

There might be someone from Madagascar, somebody from New Zealand, people from Canada, Finland, Israel, Germany, the UK, all meeting and finding a way to make that work. So there are lots of possibilities there.

I couldn't have had recordings and put them on YouTube, of course, because I would have to go through ethics and all of that kind of thing. But other people were happily posting these things.

I'm just thinking about, I was in Paris end of last year for the OECD's Creative Education Conference. There was a lot around AI, around the role of digital and how it's impacting our working lives and our education systems, making us really think: “Ok, what does it mean to work now? If a computer or software can do half of my job, what does that free me up to do? What's my role now?” And then education system, is like...

We had to do an activity that was really fun, imagining what school would look like in the next 100 years. I drew a picture of a girl with a chip in the back of her head and she's just sat in a park, having her own bespoke experience.

It makes you think: “Well, when are the times when we can be in? When are we social? When do we get together? When do we need these buildings and these institutions to serve us?” If we know that a lot of young people can just sit on YouTube and teach themselves how to do half of the things that we have to go through a more formal process to do now.

So, I do like that we're in this moment of being really critical and pulling things apart and putting them back together again.

Questioning the very purpose of a university, and all that...

Yeah, but not in a threatening way.

Opening out conversation perhaps.

John?

I was thinking about Alan Turing, who’s one of the other defining figures of the last century in terms of what people think happened in Manchester, intellectually.

One of the things about Turing, of course, is that once he was involved with Thomas Kilburn, with others in the development of the computer, he'd have to book in his two-hour slots. What he was using his slots for on the computer was to think about botany, and he was looking at the structures in botany. He was also involved in a lot of debates that would have taken place with Samuel Alexander's protégé, Dorothy Ellis. I might be getting that name wrong; I’m sure I am.

But it was in the philosophy department where she chaired these famous discussions about what a humanities scholar was, as opposed to what an AI or a thinking robot might be able to do, and what artificial intelligence was. One of the key responses that came out of those interdisciplinary discussions was: “Can AI be human?” And one of the things of course, that the philosophers and the arts scholars came back with was, “Can mathematicians be human?” as a more important question, if they were framing things only in these terms.

And it's that kind of lively gestation of ideas and testing that we really want from the physical spaces of our universities and from the classrooms. I'm somebody who missed that and missed that collider feeling that you get at a university where you're meeting people all the time who are just throwing things out to you, which you've got to go away and stumble over. So, I hope in 100 years’ time that's still happening here.

Yeah, and hopefully that human need to be present with other humans.

Yeah, I think the technology too is really important as a tool for being part of the decolonisation imperative because as we found during lockdown again, we weren't then restricted to who we could invite into the classroom here in Manchester to talk about, in my case, music from a different culture.

We could set up a Zoom link, and so we had students being taught by a Puerto Rican jazz drummer as part of their jazz course, just over the internet. So now we don't have to be passing things on second hand; I am speaking on behalf of another culture.

There's nothing to stop me apart from the internet being available, setting up a Zoom link and letting that person do the teaching, and talking.

So what I really, really hope for the future is that there will still be plenty of space for conversation, for debate, for discussion, that it's not just all handed on a plate or on a chip, but that there is still alongside that efficiency, real human conversations still happening.

Well, I saw that drummer in person two months ago.

Yes, he went into schools and did workshops with children.

But there were 100 people dancing in a tent outside in the rain the Friday before last too. He was really fantastic.

He's one of our Simon Fellows at the moment, isn’t he?

Oh, yes, he was. Carlos Maldonado. Really great.

Yes, perhaps, we’ll be defining him into Manchester in 100 years’ time.100 people dancing in the rain.

Yeah, it would definitely still be raining.

Yeah, it's a good note on which to end this particular session. Thank you very much indeed.

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Talking creative and culture: Manchester’s “anthropological soup”

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