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Talk 200 is a new lecture and podcast series from The University of Manchester, launching to mark our bicentenary: 200 years of making a difference.
This year we’re reflecting on our past, celebrating our present and looking to the future – and Talk 200 invites listeners to be part of the journey.
Our podcast host, Manchester aficionado, author, and University alumnus Andy Spinoza will be joined by a diverse line-up of guests from our community – pioneering academics and notable figures, inspiring staff, alumni and students – to discuss topics such as health, digital and AI, climate change, and equality and justice.
[Music]
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 marginalized
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 there, 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 as
evolved from the early days?
Sure, like just to kind of, one of the stories I like to tell about the university I suppose is that
it's 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 fish with the university
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 pushed 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 of what was 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
and 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 kind of 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
but 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.
You know there have been so such diverse populations in Manchester
and in terms of music they've all had their own music cultures that they've brought with
them.
And so 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 event, current issues,
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, you know,
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 being creative in their own ways.
But just tapping into what we were saying it just seems like that fluidity between,
I don't know, academia, intellectual conversation activity, culture,
being political that's always been there from my sense,
growing up as a Mancunian.
It's never felt, 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.
So 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, that's very impactful.
John, any discussion of culture and the university of Manchester,
really we should talk about creative Manchester, shouldn't we?
The platform, can you go into some detail on that?
So creative Manchester was a 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,
and a bigger and bigger part in the economy of the city,
as well as in the kind of 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,
just trying to figure out how many researchers there might be,
whose work would touch on this, and there were hundreds of researchers
who were grouped around placemaking and thinking about,
I suppose, civic responsibilities and civic futures
and then creative industries and innovation more broadly,
which might look at publishers,
it might look at festival economy, it might look at venues,
it would look at people working in the games industry,
advertising and marketing, and that huge chunk of work,
which has grown so much here.
And I suppose what's really interesting about it for us is
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 and 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
and thinking about what they might have in common
to kind of attack a research problem,
which is pressing for the city.
So creative Manchester convenes these interdisciplinary research teams
and then goes out and finds funding to support
the work they might do to answer research questions.
And it's been, I suppose the other thing is we've also
linked with our partners in the city.
So whether with the theatre, with the orchestras,
with the 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.
And I think quite relevant to that is Keisha’s project
you recently worked on in terms of bringing together
a creative response to, I believe, gene editing techniques.
I mean, can you just talk to us a little bit about that?
Yeah, so I worked with Jerome De Groote
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’ and I just got intrigued
by Jennifer Doudner and Emmanuel Champentier
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,
okay, 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 marginalized groups that I was like,
this can't be happening in silo, 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, you know?
So 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 way,
in a more quantitative way.
So 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 actually really relevant.
And I think bringing those two approaches together
is really powerful.
And you can observe those impacts in different ways.
And 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 also 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 sort of, it's like a prototype,
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.
So 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 bringing it back 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 know, 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,
they're finding something in Georgian multipart singing
that replaces something they feel they've lost,
but that they don't feel they're confined
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 20-year-old now 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 organization as well
and it is a brilliant, brilliant organization.
And yeah, 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, so different to the way that Manchester
embodies hip hop, for example.
And 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 not,
I don't feel it's me who's made a difference.
I've recognized other people out there in the world
who are making a difference.
And that's an important thing the university can do now,
I think, 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.
- It's a great aspect.
- Yes.
- It's a great way to flourish.
- I think.
- It's incredibly, it's more and more important,
doesn't it currently as well 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, but he said a lot of the anthropologists
were African anthropologists who were coming back
to encounter kind of, some of them
with colonial administrative paths
and coming back and trying to think about
those cultures completely differently.
So it was an wanted absolutely change
when the relationship between the research
and those communities just turned around.
And for him, who became kind of like this radical
firebrand of a politician kind of all through the '70s, '80s
and '90s, particularly interested in Latin America
as it turned out, but it was completely formative
of his kind of political direction,
but he's just saying 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 well,
people can 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.
- 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,
which is again, 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 you know, home to stand
the dinosaur, which everybody who goes
in a bus past university can kind of tip their hat to
as they're going by and has to, again,
like part of this big investment in the cultural institutions
over the last decade or so,
like the big 17 million pounds worth of building
has gone into the Whitworth
and the New South Asia Gallery and the China Gallery,
which are just kind of just beautiful spaces,
which I'm always sending my students to as well as,
I suppose I spent so many hours with our kids
going into those places because they're really family friendly
as well as being kind of 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, but it was founded by John Ryland's widow,
Enriqueta Ryland's, 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 a kind of almost church
like atmosphere to see saints,
but instead you've got learning,
put at the heart of what that big spaces 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 it's a lot
of the Sanskrit roles in this kind of enormous collection,
probably 210 million pounds is kind of in today's money,
it's what she spent on that collection.
So it has made it one of the great kind of foundational
library, research libraries in the world.
And the other one I should mention is Jodrell Bank,
you know, which again is outside Michael's Field,
sort of almost like a hidden space for many people.
We're very involved with the Blue Dot Festival out there,
but over the years we've run so many literary events
in Jodrell, kind of again, amazing new gallery space
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.
And 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 10 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,
and again, 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.
So 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.
- So, yes, 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.
So 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.
So 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, whatever,
what if they played music together?
What would that have sounded like?
And so 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, very well-established populations
in Manchester that have at some point
have 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.
- Right, 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.
And 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 Mancunion.
"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.
"And it galvanizes, it allows you to just travel
"and engage with people and cultures
"in a way that it's just, it can't be formalized.
"And so it just makes me very appreciative of being Mancunion.”
- Just, I just thought that's something,
like Keisha Staying has mattered so much
to the city of Manchester as well.
And 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 awarded outside of London.
And then the following year they went to another
great northern city of Leeds.
And you kind of, 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 Mancunions here.
And in literature, city of literature,
festival, can you?
- Yeah, so UNESCO City of Literature is a status,
which is awarded 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.
Well, you know, kind of talked about it as something
which always existed.
You know, there are 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 spoken every day
on the streets of Manchester.
I know the students are sent out with recorders as well
on street corners.
And 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 recognizes that.
And one of its big projects is the multilingual poets
of Manchester.
And so there are three poets.
Spanish, Urdu and Arabic language poets
who represent the city.
And I suppose Angemalek is probably the best known
of those poets, kind of a wonderful poet,
Claire Wright's Lapra Radio as well.
And she responds to and works with communities
from especially South Asian communities
to put together work where she takes their words
and turns it into poems for key occasions.
But the other thing UNESCO City of Literature has done
is I suppose it's linked to the professional writers
of the city.
So here at the University, Jeanette Winterson clearly
has been a great born in the city
and came back in as nearly 10 years working with us now
and just a wonderful writer, a great encourager
of our students as well and a great supporter
of this project, Lemn Sissay.
Again, and Lemn always comes back and is involved
in projects with us every year to do UNESCO City of Literature.
And then people like Ian McGuire,
who's now for the North Water,
was started to 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, Carmilla Shamsi's is another.
So there's this wealth of professional writing
alongside the community writing
and the growth of publishing in the city,
which is accompanied this sort of affiliation with UNESCO.
So the Hashet and others and Manchester University Press,
of course, Andy your own publisher
who are kind of 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.
I mean, what are the kind of aspirations
and what can listeners to this podcast look forward to?
Maybe in the next few years are coming out
of the cultural output of the university and of the city.
- Yeah, like I think for, like I'm putting together
a course called "Uncreativity” 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 the 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 it's going to involve 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.
And I think that is something which, you know,
it's been a tough, 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 organizations over this last 15 years or so.
So that has diminished some of the support systems
for creativity.
So what I'm hoping is that those support systems
get galvanized 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.
And I'd like there to be more,
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 from Manchester to 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 southeast
but to stay here in the northwest,
in Manchester and Liverpool and Leeds,
to go and even give Yorkshire some credit in the future.
So that's what I would like to see.
- Can I 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 just acknowledge.
And 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 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 just 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.
Like it really allows people to be at their best selves
and to be healthy citizens in the city.
So I think for me, 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, what's we're figuring out how to fund it?
(laughs)
Amazingly, what's 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.
So it is, and it is, things are thriving
and really, but it feels like in terms of music even,
I just think, you've gotten the Hallet,
you've got the BBC, you've gotten 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 us.
- 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.
So in terms of actual buildings, you know, the museums
doing a fantastic job in having all sorts of festivals
and open evenings and you can wander around
and be part of that and a lot of people go to those events
in the museum, it's amazing.
But also parks and gardens and thinking of things
like Hume Gardens 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
that 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,
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, last 30 or 40 years,
is the most fragile in terms of how it's encoded
than any previous history because 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 different, 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 I suppose 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.
So that's one thing, I think,
I think the Ryland’s is certainly leading out on
behind the scenes down there.
- I think 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.
And 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.
And 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.
And so there are lots of possibilities there.
- Every course. - For, yes.
I mean, the thing then,
so 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.
And there was a lot around AI,
around the role of digital
and how it's impacting our working lives
and our education systems and making us really think,
okay, 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 systems, it's like,
well, we had to do an activity that was really fun
of just imagining what would school look like
in the next 100 years.
And I drew a picture of a girl
with just a chip in the back of her head.
And she's just sat in a park
and she's having her own kind of bespoke experience.
So then it makes you think, okay,
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 you
and people can just sit on YouTube
and teach themselves how to do half of things
that we have to go through more of a formal process to do now.
So I do like that we're in this kind of moment
where we're being really critical
and kind of pulling things apart
and putting them back together again.
- And it's questioning the very purpose of a university.
- Yeah.
- But in my perspective, it's not in a threatening way.
- I know, opening out conversation perhaps, John.
- Yeah, I was thinking about Alan Turing, I suppose,
he's one of the other defining figures of the last century
in terms of what people think happened in Manchester,
intellectually.
And 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 his two-hour slots in.
What he was using his slots in on the computer
was to think about botany
and he was looking at the structures in botany.
And then he was also involved
Because of course you could only get on for two hours at a time
and he was involved in a lot of debates
that would have taken place with Samuel Alexander's protege,
Dorothy Ellis, I'm after getting that name wrong,
I'm sure I am.
But it was in the philosophy department
and that was where, and she chaired these famous discussions
about what a humanities scholar was,
as opposed to what an AI or a robot,
a thinking robot might be able to do
and what artificial intelligence was.
And one of the key kind of responses that came out
of those interdisciplinary discussions was,
one of the questions was,
is can AI be human?
But one of the things of course,
that the philosophers and the arts scholars
came back with, 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
and the physical spaces of our universities
and from the classrooms.
And I really, I suppose I'm somebody who missed that, you know,
and missed that kind of, 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 decolonization 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 a resume link.
And so we had students being taught
by a Puerto Rican jazz drummer
as part of their jazz course, just over the internet.
And so now we don't have to be passing things on its 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,
letting that person do the 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, if you like.
There are also real human conversations still happening.
- Well, I saw that drummer in person two months ago.
- Yes, he went into schools.
He went into schools and did workshops with children.
- But there were 100 people dancing in a tent
outside the rain the Friday before last two.
He was really fantastic.
- He's one of our Simon Fellows at the moment.
- Oh, yes, he was. - Chris Maldonado.
- Yes, perhaps. - He's a fan of the music.
- Defining image from Manchester in 100 years time.
- 100 people dancing in the rain.
- Yeah, he would definitely still be raving.
- Yeah, it's a good note on which to end this particular session.
Thank you very much indeed.
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