The Co-opting of Collaboration: Deconstructing Value, Power and Agency in Cultural Collaboration and Critique

An edit of a Keynote I gave for the Centre for Research in Art, Architecture & Design @ Birmingham City University conference: Join: Crafting Conversations with Communities, July 1st 2026.

I re-read my abstract last week.

This paper examines agency, power and value within collaborative and community-based cultural practice through a decolonial lens.

I wanted to question the assumed mutual benefits and equivalence of collaboration at a time when debates around elitism, diversity and “wokeness” continue to shape cultural discourse.

Whereby co-production is often presented as equitable exchange, but in actuality communities are frequently positioned as audiences, beneficiaries or consultees, rather than as cultural agents with authority, expertise and value.

And I remembered the frustration, the exhaustion and yes, the anger that fuelled it.

And you may well question my anger and exhaustion (I do get this a lot). You may well want to explain to me why I feel this way. (please don’t)

Because apparently, we are living through what many describe as the golden age of collaboration and cultural reciprocity.

Almost every funding application, strategic plan and cultural policy speaks about collaboration, co-production, participation, engagement, partnership and centring community voice.

These terms have become part of our lexicon, of funding bodies such as AHRC and the Arts Council, of artistic practice, of local authorities and indeed of these so-called community voices.

And so many of the projects today rightly celebrate collaboration and co-creation.

Yet at precisely the moment collaboration has become institutional orthodoxy, why do so many artists – particularly those who experience inequity and marginalisation alongside those very communities continue to experience exclusion, extractive relationships and unequal power?

I wrote this abstract in a two-week period in Birmingham which saw the far right not just evident in the street but online and mainstream. I saw opinions framed as fact as regards “community” art, that didn’t just devalue diverse practice but also elicited dog-whistle, unpalatable and racially biased commentary.

And those two weeks really laid bare the fallacy of how embedded community-rooted cultural and other work is. How ethnicity is seen as valuable up to a point. And when you comment that you found (along with many others) the framing of diverse led collaborative practice as less than “excellent” as pandering to some mythical public that lacks agency and critical faculty; then you are dismissed and your opinion, which is valued enough to be asked to be a keynote here, is met with a patronising pat on the arm, a smile and a head tilt.

So today I want to ask a simple but uncomfortable question.

Who really benefits from collaboration? And the reason collaboration has become performative is that we continue to measure the wrong things

“I think the answer lies in what the sector chooses to value. It has become very good at measuring participation, representation and outputs. And it has become much less willing to ask who holds authority, who defines excellence, and who decides what counts as value.”

In the AHRC Theory of Change, inclusion, equity and diversity are referenced liberally.

“Our future is unlocked by diverse voices, including those that have previously been overlooked.

Research and innovation is diverse and inclusive”

 Across AHRC guidance, and across the guidance and website, collaboration, co-production and community voice have become central to the language of research, especially as regards impact. Yet the funding data tells a different story. White principal investigators continue to enjoy substantially higher success rates than Black and Asian applicants. Academia has become much better at talking about diversity than redistributing authority.  

Similarly, principal investigators who did not disclose their ethnicity had a significantly higher award rate (36%) than Asian and Black ethnic groups.

Institutions increasingly speak the language of collaboration and inclusion while structural inequalities in who receives power and funding remain.

And this matters because work focused on diversity and inclusion is not led on the whole by those who bring with them lived experience and also lived expertise of these subjects within their own sphere of academic research- EDI is not an output of research it is a theme, a process and a culture. Whilst large-scale programmes like the AHRC-funded Creative Communities have shifted the dial on community participation, the lack of equity in a system that is founded on hierarchy, patriarchy and reinforcing Western class systems means this is an output, not a guiding principle for research.

And to dismiss this observation as meaningless is to perpetuate the colonial framing of collaborative partners, especially those from marginalised backgrounds and further compounds the devaluing of community-rooted cultural work by framing it as instrumental and rendering the collaborative institution as culturally elitist and woke – a dangerous position in increasingly polarised times.

Because this dynamic reflects wider societal narratives around diversity and inclusion, as seen in the recent local elections.

The devaluing of equality, diversity and inclusion within collaborative practice has led to EDI ennui – a reductionism of its essentiality, and it being reduced to a symbol of woke-ism and leftism.

And this is true: as institutions become more inclusive, they have also become increasingly vulnerable to accusations of elitism and “wokeness.”

And one cannot fail to have seen this given the endless attention in public discourse.

And again, this perpetuates a false binary: you’re elitist or populist- heritage and tradition vs diversity (as seen with flags as symbols)

And these are also false choices caused in part by an adoption of a diversity narrative without the accompanying redistribution of power.

Because inclusive collaboration is symbolic if it is without structural change, and that satisfies neither critics nor communities.

It leaves institutions defending programmes that have changed appearances while preserving hierarchies.

Through instruments like DYCP, the new NPO round and the Inclusivity and relevance Principle, Arts Council England has undoubtedly shifted investment and diversified organisations and artists. I have seen that change first-hand from my time on Area Council and the Race Action Group. But structural change has been much slower than representational change. Too often collaboration has become another programme rather than a redistribution of authority

Pace, however, is glacially slow, and as with the academic research, the subtle whispering of leftism (what does that even mean), woke investment and a backlash against LGBTQI+ work is subtly undermining what is meant by diverse-led practice or embedded community practice

What this work has not done is engender organisational cultural change- it has brought about products and projects that are designed to increase diversity by working with communities, and indeed there is much good practice in the arts whereby people are working long term with care and nuance.

But structurally, this means of collaboration has been used by the people who posted black squares on Instagram and came up with anti-racist statements without looking at their all-white boards or senior management teams.  It’s used by people doing work for the so-called hard-to-reach and will almost definitely be found in the Outreach and Education section of an annual report.

 This framing of collaboration is redolent of patriarchy and benevolence- it is about invitations in and permissions. It blurs and homogenises in order to make difference palatable whilst simultaneously perpetuating othering. The use of the word community in this renders us into one homogeneous group and conflates everything into one. And in doing so it erases us.

 This is colonial collaboration - it is about privilege and even more, so it is about neglect. It neglects to recognise the individuality of our ethnicity and our lived experience. It neglects to recognise our diversity, our equality, our authority and agency and our humanity.

So, are the benefits of collaboration truly equal?

Audience data would suggest not; why are diverse audiences figures still so low for funded cultural practice?

The 2025 State of the Nations report from the Creative PEC showed increasing inequality in the arts

In nearly all cases, Black and Asian people are less likely than people in other ethnic groups to have engaged in the DCMS categorised arts, culture and heritage activities for example, 23% of Black people and 19% of Asian people had attended live music, compared with 42% of White people. However, the Live Music Mapping Project at Aston University recently found that over half of live music in Birmingham happens in non-music venues, such as churches, community centres, and restaurants. Culture is happening not just where the sector thinks

And the ACE 2018-2023 review speaks for itself.

Collaboration as cultural orthodoxy

But this data goes against the grain of the prevailing narrative of collaboration as cultural orthodoxy.

Cultural organisations have been quick to vocalise and embrace co-production and collaboration, to look to increase participation for those from marginalised backgrounds and to look for social outcomes.

Their role as gateways to public engagement somehow renders them as cultural paragons of community practice, increasing their legitimacy in a hierarchy of performative virtue signalling, which means they do not fundamentally have to change who they are or cede power or share agency with the communities they extract from.

Collaboration and co-production have been co-opted and used performatively to signify cultural virtue. Intent is there without doubt- to reflect local and national population and to be relevant and resonant.

But maybe the response post the Hodge review reveals some of the answer.

The audible sigh of relief when ACE published their new Strategic Framework revealed how precarious centring collaboration and co-production has been to some in the sector.

The narrative on this so-called "return to excellence” was rather curious. 

To me, it rather implied that work that was created throughout the last strategy (which was consulted at length) was never of excellence, and so what does that say of the millions of people who have enjoyed cultural work in lots of different settings and contexts through programmes like Creative People and Places, and Place Partnerships?

The framing of these smacks of a redundant, reductive cultural elitism that really no longer has any place in a contemporary, diverse world. I did wonder on Linked in I if I had gaslit myself and was reading it differently - but checked in with several colleagues who deliver excellence at scale and with impact, and they agreed with my reading. So maybe no one read this line: "As part of this vision, communities should be empowered to foster the arts and culture they want, including seeing their own experiences reflected. "

If the engagement of communities is seen as homogeneous – to be invited in to be part of a singular participation project, then maybe the prevailing orthodoxy means we increasingly celebrate participation itself rather than asking what participation actually changes.

The language too has become over familiar to the point of losing meaning:

• Co-create.

• Co-design.

• Community-led.

• Co-produced.

• Shared ownership.

Yet when we examine how that decision-making is made more closely, we often discover that these concepts remain largely rhetorical, budget allocations will have been predetermined and fixed centrally without interrogation.

The organisational business plan will have set objectives often aligned to meaningless funding objectives which even the most embedded producer will struggle to interpret with authenticity

My bête noir is the evaluation frameworks which will ask for metrics to reinforce confirmation bias as pertains to success. They have intrinsic bias as to assumptions on audience and demographics and taste. True evaluation would require the organisation to be genuinely curious about the audience’s experiences of the work, and the wider context your work exists within. As I said in an article for The Space, “We don’t often ask, ‘How did the space feel?’ ‘Did you feel welcome?’”

If a project is truly collaborative, then the evaluation framework should be iterative and responsive and might adapt as the collaboration develops- without fixed expectations, then the framework becomes more nuanced, richer and with the potential for unexpected outcomes and a plurality of perspectives.

Yes, this is harder to process and also resource, but surely this unveiling of ideas and thinking is what art should be?

The lack of true authentic collaboration results in spaces where communities will have been invited into conversations and activities whereby the parameters have already been established.

Where people become consultees rather than authors, participants rather than decision-makers; contributors rather than owners; and this is not collaboration- it is consultation.

It is based on permissions in and a lack of authorial voice or agency.

In Museums and the History of Computing Objects, Narratives and Practice; edited by Simone Natale, Petrina Foti, Ross Parry (2025), I commented that “In doing so museums must look to a new form of blended narrative that invites in multiple narratives including the aspects of bias and interpretation that come with this. This is also overlain with the context of each institution and the cultural paradigm that are embedded in them, especially for what concerns shifts in attitudes towards race, gender, sexuality, and disability, as well as diversity and inclusion.”

Collaborative practice, critical discourse and external perception can all serve to reproduce colonial power dynamics, whereby institutions retain control over decision-making, interpretation and value. Thus, in such contexts, the community collaborator risks being absorbed into institutional frameworks (assimilation) rather than an agent of reciprocal cultural exchange (integration)

Institutions have to move beyond adding multiple voices. They have to relinquish the assumption that they alone hold the authoritative narrative.

Collaboration as cultural praxis or colonial logics?

Do these dynamics reflect something deeper?

Because they reproduce the tropes of colonial relationships and coloniality as a continuing way of organising knowledge and authority.

The authorial voice is held by the cultural organisation or public institution that holds the power to culturally colonise. It assimilates the contribution of the collaborating partner yet stays steadfast in its power dynamic, in its inherent power hierarchy, rendering the community as other and othered.

The funded cultural system is a neoliberal mechanism which determines in true colonial fashion:

• Whose knowledge counts.

• Whose expertise matters.

• Who is allowed to interpret and how

• Who decides value.

Now I recognise many cultural institutions have worked hard to diversify their workforce and to commission more diverse artists and work to support the needs of wider audiences- indeed I work with many of them. But they are in the minority.

I also recognise that investment and resourcing have impacted on the capacity to adapt and change, and not all funded organisations are really captains of their own destiny at times. And I also recognise that the metrics that bind them, in themselves, are instrumentalist and operate in a deficit model.

And yet. This is not new. This is about meaning and cultural value and who gets to decide that. It isn’t about artistic excellence vs community-embedded praxis in some meaningless binary. But it is about perpetuating outmoded methods of production that certainly have no relevance to contemporary cultural consumption

I choose not to call this diversification, as it means you are expanding a contested standard- this is about dismantling that standard and creating an expanded narrative on culture and participation that ensures true representation and redistribution of power.

• Because diversification alone does not dismantle colonial structures.

• Because representation is not redistribution.

• Inviting communities into existing institutional frameworks often leaves those frameworks untouched.

• The institution remains the centre of authority.

• Communities are welcomed only insofar as they fit existing definitions of success.

• This is assimilation rather than integration.

Assimilation asks people to adapt to institutions.

Integration asks institutions to change themselves.

That distinction is fundamental.

Knowledge is Power

When collaboration is co-opted, there is a power imbalance in how knowledge is viewed and valued

The institution or organisation is seen as the authorial voice, the hierchical power, the coloniser of collaboration.

This devalues cultural intelligence held within the collaborating partners.

It is why the word community, which I have been careful to use sparingly, is now so devalued and imbued with an inequitable value as it becomes the receiver of knowledge, or worse, has its own knowledge reflected back to it through a refracted monocultural lens

Whatever we mean by communities, they all have histories, relationships and formal and informal networks that hold within them complex histories and narratives, memories, trust and multiple identities.

Yet this expertise is rarely recognised as expertise.

The primary organisation is the repository of professional and therefore official knowledge remains visible.

Community knowledge remains anecdotal whilst institutional research becomes evidence.

One carries authority.

The other requires validation.

This imbalance shapes commissioning, evaluation and policy and reinforces extraction as well as shaping public perception of communities as incapable and without merit or status

Community-rooted cultural practice is frequently described as socially useful but rarely seen as artistically excellent within the frameworks of Western, heteronormative patriarchal art systems

Institutions increasingly rely upon communities for legitimacy while simultaneously retaining ownership of interpretation.

I have repeatedly encountered this throughout my own practice.

During my independent review of diversity for The Space, we analysed their anonymised records alongside interviews with artists, commissioners and staff. The review found an organisation deeply committed to improving representation, yet it also revealed a familiar pattern. Diversity was largely being understood through who accessed opportunities rather than who shaped them. Artists from underrepresented backgrounds often remained recipients of institutional processes rather than partners in defining them. The challenge was not simply widening participation but reconsidering how commissioning, decision-making and cultural authority were distributed.

This distinction matters because diversity is not simply about representation. It is about redistribution of power.

And yes, The Space accepted this challenge and responded to it with structural changes.

And with power comes the question of value.

The politics of value

So, how do we recognise cultural value? Obviously, this is a whole other debate -one which has raged for years.

For decades cultural policy has attempted to answer what cultural value is this through measurement:

• Attendance.

• Economic impact.

• Health outcomes.

• Educational outcomes.

• Regeneration.

• Visitor numbers.

• Social return on investment.

These metrics are useful.

But this is not the full story as it privileges data which can be counted (in itself inherent with bias) and doesn’t privilege what matters and what counts.

Because we know value borne of collaborative work exists elsewhere; outside of the formal framework, outside the institution.

Because cultural value is

• Trust.

• Confidence.

• Belonging.

• Reciprocity.

• Collective memory.

• Neighbourhood identity.

These are slow values and as such isn’t a static value judgement but one which will flex and become irrelevant with time.

Cultural value emerges over years rather than funding cycles and beyond staffing allocations.

And they frequently determine whether cultural work has lasting impact.

My early point re-evaluation is that if incorrectly framed then shapes future projects and the institution commissions artists who have to produce what can be measured- creating a false dynamic.

In this scenario – what is recognised is delivered. Obviously, it is important to add that without metrics we cannot measure who is missing. But making the metrics and some soft qualitative narrative the outputs means we diminish the long-term outcomes.

Communities become an evidence and participation becomes an output.

The collaboration itself becomes performative

The Centre for Cultural Value centres this in its research: they investigate how different kinds of arts, cultural and heritage activities create value, for whom, and in which conditions and contexts, and there are some excellent resources not just featuring me as regards evaluation, but also on cultural place-making and the role of value and whose value it is.

They talk about “Cultural vitality as central to understanding the cultural and artistic health of the places we live. It involves understanding the dynamic interactions between cultural activities and opportunities, participation, diversity, access, and infrastructure, which collectively shape the identity and well-being of our communities.”

A good example of this is Pangaea, an organisation I work with, and their 3D-5D learning Revolution. This uses sculpture as a tool for wider learning.

In Barr's Hill School, pupils began by researching how their city was changing, including what happens to buildings, materials and energy systems during demolition and redevelopment. This introduced concepts such as urban mining, embodied carbon, circular economy and material reuse, helping pupils understand the environmental impact of the built environment and the role of energy transition in shaping future cities.

They worked with a professional artist; pupils visited local sites and archives, connecting Coventry’s industrial history with contemporary questions around net zero, sustainability and regeneration. This research was then translated into hands-on making, using reclaimed and repurposed materials to develop sculptural responses to reimagine an underused area of their school grounds as a future-facing civic space.

And the value in this way of working is seen as having impact in many different ways- social, cultural, environmental and civic value but also as they work with industrial partners- economically in developing a future workforce.

If we evaluate collaboration solely through economic outcomes, we misunderstand what many communities are actually trying to create.

So, we need a different understanding of value, and that doesn’t mean eschewing evidence and evaluation but means recognising multiple forms of evidence.

• Stories.

• Relationships.

• Care.

• Memory.

• Belonging.

• Reciprocity.

The "C" Word

What do we even mean by community? I was at an event last week with the new leader of Birmingham City Council; an interesting speaker, but he referenced communities endlessly. So, I asked what he meant. I am Sri Lankan and therefore not the same as other South Asian people, but we are all lumped together into a South Asian narrative which in itself is now so redundant as to be utterly meaningless

Demographic data itself shapes cultural policy. A useful tool is the Culture and Place Data Explorer, which captures some fascinating insights into cultural consumption by demographics and place. I will admit to being obsessed.

However, too often how this analysis is used is flawed, as it frequently shows a narrative on place and culture at odds with the consumption model the sector centres, so therefore the findings are reported as a deficit. Too many people going to the cinema? That means they aren’t experiencing culture that the formal sector sets a standard on.

This aligned with demographic capture, means that communities are seen through deprivation indices, ethnic difference, social need or lack of participation.

Now I use data constantly, and datasets are valuable, but they can also be used to reinforce deficit narratives if taken in isolation.

And this is where it gets interesting if collaborative practice is to move beyond the extractive

Demographic change represents accumulated cultural capital and shows generational and migrational movement and social mobility. It tells the story of cities in flux and cultural identities with new stories that bring always evolving artistic traditions, languages, networks, entrepreneurialism, faith practices, food cultures and different understandings of place.

As Stuart Hall says: they are subject to the continuous play of history, culture and power

Places and communities are repeatedly described through deficit:

• Their deprivation and challenges.

• They are communities needing engagement or areas that are needing intervention.

Shifting this narrative, means collaboration changes; that communities cease being recipients and become producers; authors, knowledge holders and partners in cultural democracy.

There is shared ownership and agency

True collaborative work embraces this rather than accommodates it, and becomes part of the learning journey.

For two years I have been working in Aberdeen on community-led projects, funded by the Energy Transition Zone.

Touch of Love is a food justice charity working primarily with New Scots (recently arrived migrants). The story of Aberdeen is complex- from the fishing trade through to oil and gas and now renewables. Torry is an area which has significant social deprivation but also much ambition, dynamism and different communities, some of whom have a very contested relationship with the council and ETZ.

Luckily, I worked directly with organisations such as Touch of Love, seen as a really important food justice charity.

Or, as we saw them a vital part of a new community. They were keen to develop something intergenerationally, and we developed an oral history project whereby the young people they worked with interviewed some of the more established residents- this went beyond ethnicity and age and into a relational narrative on memories of the sea- from fishing industry to migration, to oil and gas and to rail. Everyone had different stories, and what emerged was a new telling of those stories. One gentleman is in his 70s- he came from Japan in the 70s and has a beautiful flower garden. Yet he has never been seen as one of the faces of the community,

As a result of our work, this year Touch of Love set up a new arts and culture CIC and has been invited onto the board of Culture Aberdeen – our collaboration enabled them to have visibility in a sector which hadn’t seen them in this way. Someone said, “Oh isn’t it wonderful when you give people permission.” I replied there had been no permissions to start with.

What I did have to do on those projects, especially being English was to spend time in Aberdeen and learn its history and relationship with migration and industry. In this case, being ethnically diverse was important and also my networks- we brought the best people to work with them – so the young people were trained in social media journalism by Nicole Justice here in Birmingham, who works with the BBC Academy young journalists. The standard was always high because I had to meet them where they were and not make assumptions.

This is Jane from Touch of Love: "Lara also helped us understand that culture is not separate from community work - it lives inside stories, identity, belonging, heritage, and place.

Those conversations eventually became part of the journey that led to the creation of Touch of Love Arts & Culture CIC. Looking back now, I realise that some of the most important growth in organisations happens because someone took the time to nurture possibility before it was fully visible."

Because cities in flux reflect a place and people diversity that represents accumulated knowledge, and this is a multiplicity of histories, traditions and understanding of place. There isn’t always a single reliable narrator but many voices at different points of that place’s history

My colleague Helga Henry and I have been working in Birmingham for the last 18 months looking at the city’s trends, demographically, educationally, economically and socially. And it portrays a very different story to the one that is heard in the “young and diverse narrative”. It shows a very fluid intergenerational and demographically evolving population creating and taking part in culture outside formalised funded structures and shows a growth in non-funded spaces and very different audience behaviours than has been assumed by some.

Our work on civic pride was not the story told through cultural institutions, iconic architecture or city branding campaigns.

Civic pride was about recognition, seeing your own history acknowledged and knowing your contribution matters.

People believe that their neighbourhood is culturally significant and to them place is about belonging, visibility and ownership.

And civic pride develops through relationships that recognise local knowledge as expertise rather than consultation.

So where do we go from here?

Cultural democracy is referenced in all collaboration practice but is it true democracy- the title of the Steel Pulse album, obvs from Birmingham, and also a chapter title from a report Helga and I did.

We do indeed need to move beyond the tropes of engagement and participation to cultural democracy- but it has to be true and authentic.

Rather than asking how institutions diversify communities, we might instead ask how communities diversify institutions?

This reframing shifts the conversation from inclusion towards reciprocity.

Indeed, is it cultural reciprocity we are actually seeking?

Diversity and inclusion stops being something organisations deliver for and becomes something organisations learn from.

Moving beyond participation means dismantling systems that favour biased metrics towards a devolved system of joint power and agency. And by the way this is already happening outside those recognised structures.

So, it means moving beyond who to engage with and looking at authority and ownership and who decides. It means embedding steps to devolve power and understand that power morphs and flexes as adaptation to this becomes part of the process and a learning for everyone.

We reframe the institution as the owner and bestower of knowledge and create frameworks of learning that recognise all partners as producers of knowledge.

We create frameworks that invest in long-term solutions, understanding that this will need to evolve iteratively as development progresses and needs change.

It means building capacity, social capital and wealth that is not defined by our lived experiences but those of the collaborative partners, so that budget and financial ownership can be devolved.

It means sharing credit, better understanding of shared IP and means we look to interpretation differently and ultimately ask the question- who defines excellence?

And of course, this require structural change and commensurate investment. It also means some unpalatable truths and opinions will be in the mix

For cultural reciprocity and democracy to be authentic, we need:

• Shared decision-making from the outset.

• Co-designed Evaluation.

• Co-designed success outcomes

• Plurality in expertise

• And thus, the institutional authority becomes one voice among many.

• Long-term relationships replace project-based extraction.

Importantly, artists are no longer positioned as intermediaries translating institutions to communities or vice versa. There isn’t a hierarchy of legitimising

Instead, everyone becomes engaged in shared cultural production where power is relinquished and shared, where collaboration stops being extractive and becomes reciprocal, where inclusion brings with its agency and true cultural democracy.

So how does the shift from institutional inclusion towards cultural democracy, shared authority and community agency happen

 Much of my work over the past decade—from organisational development programmes in Wales, to anti-racism initiatives, place-based partnerships and national research—has led me to one consistent conclusion.

Organisations do not become more equitable simply by becoming more diverse.

They become more equitable when they become more willing to share authority and have shared governance, shared interpretation and shared ownership of culture itself.

Cultural democracy is not another way to engage with communities it is about the redistribution of power.

So perhaps the greatest challenge facing the cultural sector today is not that diverse communities aren’t engaging with them, because those people are and always have been culturally active.

The challenge is whether organisations and institutions are prepared to recognise the plurality of communities not simply as participants but as equal producers of culture.

And that means more than inclusion; it means redistribution:

• Redistribution of authority.

• Redistribution of expertise.

• Redistribution of value.

If collaboration is to fulfil its promise, we must stop asking how institutions can include communities.

Instead, we should ask:

How can institutions become part of communities’ cultural futures rather than expecting communities to become part of institutional futures? Are institutions prepared to need communities in equally transformative ways as they expect communities to need them

That, I believe, is the difference between collaboration as process and collaboration as cultural democracy.

Because if collaboration leaves existing hierarchies untouched, then it is not collaboration at all—it is simply participation in someone else’s system.

And whilst this is hard work- it is so exciting- making and seeing in different ways, exploring and understanding multiple perspectives to create new work in new ways.

If collaboration changes to:

who holds knowledge, who defines value, who tells the story and who owns the future, then collaboration becomes something much more powerful.

It becomes true cultural democracy.

Who benefits from collaboration?

Everyone. But only when power is shared.”

Thanks to Dr Sian Hindle and Dr Sian Vaughan for the invitation and their always generous support and trust.