Mulhall, Henry Robert (2024) Cultural constellations: communities and publics in the Union Street area of Plymouth. PhD thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
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Abstract
My research aims to understand how various forms of national and local discourse constitute the interactions between communities of cultural practice in the Union Street area of Plymouth. I ask how rhetorical uses of language found in planning and policy discourses feed, stimulate or hinder interaction in the area. I focus on the period between 2010 and 2022 because of the significant shifts the area saw in this decade, including the formation of Nudge, a community benefit society, and the opening of KARST, a contemporary art gallery. Through three phases of practice-based, participatory research, including participatory diagrams, a focus group, and feedback filmmaking, I reflexively investigate the relationships between a range of people who work in art, culture, and community orientated fields. My objective is to understand how these people interact, as well as to understand how factors external to Union Street and Plymouth, such as Arts Council documents such as Let’s Create from 2020, can affect, negatively or positively, such a cultural dynamic. By focusing on a specific location, this research aims to understand how various national and local discourses affect a specific urban context, and how cultural policy and local cultural practices affect a specific public. Through a practice-based methodology informed by feminist ordinary language philosophy, I develop two concepts that assist me in the description, interpretation, and analysis of the discourses I encounter. Firstly, I use a constellatory frame, where I connect groups of people through similarity and dissimilarity in their uses of language. Secondly, I approach the research with an emphasis on feedback, that is, I feed the outcome of my methods back to research participants so that their interpretations become part of the process. Importantly, this included critiques of my research methods. I have chosen Union Street because I am from Plymouth and have seen first-hand significant changes taking place. Union Street and the surrounding area are notorious in Plymouth for low economic status and as an erstwhile nightlife hub. Although there are still social and economic issues, the area has changed dramatically over the last decade and a half. Here, I determine how such shifts interact with the rise of art and community spaces activating a range of cultural activity in the area.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Thesis |
|---|---|
| Copyright Holders: | The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, who asserts his/her right to be known as such according to the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. No dealing with the thesis contrary to the copyright or moral rights of the author is permitted. |
| Depositing User: | Acquisitions And Metadata |
| Date Deposited: | 11 Oct 2024 08:17 |
| Last Modified: | 11 Oct 2024 08:35 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/54371 |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.18743/PUB.00054371 |
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