Michael Eades

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Research Summary and Profile

Research interests:

Culture, English Literature

Regions:

England, United Kingdom

Summary of research interests and expertise:

My research interests intersect with my professional practice (and vice-versa). In broad terms, all my work explores what I call the ‘cultural politics of cultural practice’. I am interested in the structures, intuitions and social contexts in which cultural/artistic practice takes place, particularly in relation to ideas of community and place. A lot of my work has explored festivals of various kinds, but I am also interested in galleries, museums, archives, public arts and funding and policy infrastructures in both the cultural sphere and higher education. Across all of this, I'm interested in narratives of place and community are formed, and how they might be told in different, more challenging ways.

My research has developed alongside an ongoing professional career in community arts and public engagement. These two sides of my practice overlap significantly. A large proportion of my research is therefore practice-based, whether organising festivals, curating public programmes, working on collaborative projects or pursuing my own practice. I'm generally interested in different ways of framing research 'outputs', including in the emerging discipline of Creative Critical Writing.

Publication Details

Related publications/articles:

Date	Details
17-Feb-2020	'Documenting Disappearance: a day in the ‘research laboratory’ of Iona and Peter Opie' Journal articles Performance Research
20-Jul-2016	‘Festival in a Box’: Development and qualitative evaluation of an outreach programme to engage socially isolated people with dementia Journal articles
25-Jun-2015	Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: engaging socially isolated people with dementia. Final Report. Research aids  Final project report to AHRC
27-Jul-2013	Arts on Prescription: a qualitative longitudinal outcomes study Journal articles

Research Projects & Supervisions

Research projects:

Details
Bloomsbury Festival Cultural Engagement Project Central Services of the School Project period: 11-Feb-2013 - 31-May-2013 Research interests: Communications, Communities, Classes, Races, Culture, Fellowships, Library
Being Human Festival of the Humanities Central Services of the School Project period: 01-May-2015 - 01-Dec-2015 Research interests: Culture, Music, Politics, Social Sciences
Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: engaging socially isolated people with dementia Between August 2013 and May 2014 I was PI on the AHRC-funded research project Bloomsbury Festival in a Box: engaging socially isolated people with dementia. This project researched, implemented and analysed a pilot scheme for engaging people with dementia in the arts. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of the two-year Cultural Value Project, the project was a collaboration between the School of Advanced Study, University of London, University College London, the Bloomsbury Festival, and Age UK Camden.

Relevant Events

Related events:

Date	Details
01-Feb-2020	Being Human festival My current focus of activity is curating and managing Being Human – the UK’s only national festival of the humanities. I helped establish this festival in 2014, and it now takes place annually at venues across the UK. Since its inception, the festival has reached hundreds of thousands of people nationally and internationally, and seen events popping up everywhere from Singapore to the Orkney Isles.
15-Nov-2019	MIR #11 with The Secret Diary of Bloomsbury - Everyday Poetry In the eleventh episode of the MIR Podcast, Peter J Coles talks to Elizabeth Dearnley and Michael Eades about their project The Secret Diary of Bloomsbury.
01-Sep-2015	Festival in a Box: Archives Exhibition at the Leeds College of Art displaying research outputs and orginal artworks developed as part of the 'Bloomsbury Festival in a Box' project. The exhibition was aimed primarily at stucdents and practitioners at the start of their careers and was seen by around 2,000 people in autumn/winter 2015.
01-May-2014	Festival in a Box: sharing knowledge on dementia and the arts Project dissemintaion/knowledge share day for the Bloomsbury Festival in a Box Project . The day provided an environment in which the lessons learned from our project could be contextualised in relation to the broader landscape of arts and health projects working with people with dementia. Podcasts of talks from the day are available here: https://festivalinabox.blogs.sas.ac.uk/outputs/
23-Oct-2013	Ministry of Communication Curatorial project at the School of Advanced Study funded by the AHRC’s Cultural Engagement Fund Pilot Scheme. For this project I curated a programme of events and original art commissions for the Bloomsbury Festival in October 2013. The project was designed to act as a catalyst for public engagement activity in the University of London, and to help the School of Advanced Study to reassess its place in relation to the cultures, histories and communities of its immediate civic milieu. The programme featured speakers including Will Self, Iain Sinclair, Andrew Motion and Ruth Padel, contributions from across the School's research institutes, and four original art commissions - one funded by an additional grant from the Arts Council of England. Outputs are archived here: www.michaeleades.net/2013/10/02/ministry-of-communication-bloomsbury-festival-2013/

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