Past Events

Join Dr Josh Siepel, Senior Lecturer (Sussex University) and Creative PEC Research Consortium Partner for R&D, Innovation and Clusters, as he discusses the findings from the research. Introduced by Professor Hasan Bakhshi, Director Creative PEC, and a panel of industry guests, including Syima Aslam MBE, CEO and Artistic Director, Bradford Literature Festival and Dr Jen Ballie, Head of Design Research, V&A Dundee. There will be a Q&A and the opportunity for you to put your questions to the panel. Additional speakers to be announced.

Join creative industry policy makers, researchers and practitioners from around the UK for a day of lightning talks, panel discussions, keynotes and performances.

The State of Creativity will be held at the BFI building in the iconic South Bank Centre. You will get to listen to leading thinkers from across the country and internationally share the latest findings on key themes such as inclusive growth, R&D, skills, education, and createch.

In the early 20th century there was a fundamental shift in the industrial significance of authorship. Individual and family firms gave way to multi-national enterprises, contractual terms became standardised and the negotiating power of the individual was substantially diminished. This talk looks at how the Society of Authors (UK) facilitated the rise of industrial authorship.

Anjali Vats will be delivering the first CREATe Online Public Lecture of the academic year 2021/22. Due to Covid-19 lockdown restrictions which remain in place, this event will be hosted online.

What goes on in the creative sector plays a significant role in shaping the national conversation – representation matters. This sector knows better than any other that diversity breeds creativity. Forward thinking employers within the industry are already making socio-economic inclusion a goal in their organisations, but we know there is still much work to be done.

The Covid pandemic has had a devastating impact on the arts and cultural industries throughout the UK and continental Europe. For much of the UK’s creative sector the nightmare of closed venues and out of work cultural producers, performers and technicians is being exacerbated by the absence of a ‘cultural passport’ in the Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA) negotiated by the UK government with the European Union. Simultaneously, and accelerated by the lockdown, the continuing ‘digital shift’ is effecting radical changes to the way in which we produce and consume culture.

As part of the COVID-19 national research project, led by the Centre for Cultural Value in collaboration with the PEC and The Audience Agency, this event will bring together leading contributors from the academic and cultural sectors, for our first COVID-19 research webinar – Covid-19: “The great unequaliser?”

Despite no evidence of difference in the creative abilities of men and women, female artists remain underrepresented and unequally recognised across the creative professions. Research on this topic has emphasised how audiences, critics, and other gatekeepers discriminate against women, but it has not fully explained the complex relationship between gender and creative production.

The creative industries can be a catalyst of innovation across all sectors, enabling transformative new products and services which can drive regional economic growth, wellbeing and quality of life. In particular, the integration of technology and creative industries (‘Createch’) can satisfy consumer demands and solve societal challenges. Perhaps harnessing virtual production, VR or AR and theatre practice to areas as diverse as mental health training, dementia support and pain control.

Join AEA Consulting and the Global Cultural Districts Network, for the next session of the GCDN Conversations series: Do cultural districts foster the creative economy?

CREATe, the UK Copyright and Creative Economy Centre based at the University of Glasgow, recently started work on a number of ambitious projects for the next five years. These are funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (as part of the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre), the Leverhulme Trust, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. While we have conceived this 2019 Symposium as work-in-progress, we are committed to an interdisciplinary and long-term perspective. In these uncertain times, we need to look both backward (where do we come from?) and forward (where might we go?).

This panel discussion focuses on the ongoing initiatives and projects that engage with the creative culture sector (including live music) in the West Midlands due to the upcoming Commonwealth Games 2022 against the backdrop of the Brexit and COVID-19. The panelist will talk about Birmingham’s preparations for the Commonwealth Games and its cultural programme, engagement with various stakeholders, and the challenges and opportunities posted by those two historical events. The sensitivity of the region and the city to the effects of Brexit and COVID-19 on the ‘cultural tourism’ economy place it at the centre of the local and the global in the creative culture economy.

This paper discusses the politics of craft value and how it is communicated and recognised. Drawing on interviews with women makers of colour in the UK, the paper explores how getting their craft skills recognised and valued as expertise is a challenge which hinders their ability to establish a full-time career in craft. The paper argues that this is linked to how the craft practice of marginalised groups has traditionally been denigrated or omitted from accounts of craft processes within the creative economy

This short talk will briefly present two recent research projects – the 2019 report on the ‘representation of Female Artists in Britain commissioned by the Freelands Foundation’ and a quantitative analysis of more than 100 commercial galleries in London between 2016 and 2019 and the representation of female artists.