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NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 64th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” This episode will be available starting 15 May 2026. You can find it and all episodes at iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Podbean and find links to accompany the podcasts.
Last month we shared a recording of the workshop on cultural policy François Matarasso and I delivered at the International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam. This month’s episode is based on the second workshop we offered there, focusing on ethics and community-based arts practice. This is kind of an obsession for both of us.
My story is that years ago, when I was invited to speak at art schools, I noticed that almost none of them offered a course on the ethics of participatory or cocreated work. There were individual educators who had solid community experience and shared their own principles and perspectives in their teaching on murals or devised theater and the like. But that didn’t seem sufficient. A workshop can’t replace a course, but it might encourage students to did into the topic on their own. I started including a workshop on ethics along with every speaking engagement I accepted.
At the start of the ICAF workshop, François explained his enduring interest in ethics. “I’ve thought about these things from the very beginning. When I started my my working life as a young community artist, as you tend to do at that age, I had lots of idealism and hopes. Naturally, that raised questions about what I was doing. So the first thing to say is that every aspect of human relations involves unequal power. Sometimes it’s temporary: you’re all sitting there listening to me, so I have more power right now, I can control the direction in which things go and so on. But there are differences in authority, in knowledge, in skills, in confidence, in status, and much more. So every time you’re starting a workshop, all of those differences are in the room, and they can’t be wished away.”
By now I’ve done more ethics workshops than I can count. The basic idea is to share ethical issues, impacts, perspectives, and values with students in the first half of the workshop; then use the second half to go through a five-step process of exploring, understanding, and responding to an example offered by participants of an ethical challenge that arises in the course of their work. Some of them are pretty straightforward: a funder dislikes the ideas or images depicted in a community mural or play and demands the work be altered or even tries to shut it down. Others are more complex, for instance, how a community artist working with people who are dealing with difficult material—say foster kids or abuse survivors—walks the line between dialogue and a kind of forced intimacy which can be damaging. At miaaw.net, you can download a PDF that contains a good deal of the material we shared in the workshop.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the podcast about basic ideas and values informing the work. For instance, François shares his perspective on the notion of empowerment. “I can’t help anybody directly. I can only help them get access to the means by which they can do that. When I say means, I don’t only mean tools or resources. I mean skills, knowledge, confidence, all of the things that we get out of doing the work. We’re going to talk about how the point of this work is about empowerment. I’ve had many conversations with fellow community artists over the years, many who object to the concept of empowerment because they read it as being condescending. They read it as ‘how can I give power to this person?’ My answer is you’re not giving power. Giving power to anyone is useless, because if you’ve given it, you can take it back. The only power that’s worth having is the power we take for ourselves. We take power because we’ve gained new skills, we’ve gained confidence, we’ve done something we couldn’t do before, and it changes how we think about ourselves. But it’s us who’s doing it, no one else, and that that process is is at the heart of this.”
One essential message we offered was that ethical challenges are intrinsic to this work. We counsel community artists to accept that, rather than feel defeated or anxious if a challenge arises, recognize this truth articulated by François:
“None of these problems, the problems of of power and the problems of diversity, of difference, they’re not to be wished away. They’re not things we can sit here and resolve, and once we’ve resolved them then we can get on with the art project. They’re how we do the art project. They’re constant. They come up all the time, and they are actually the purpose of the art project, because through dealing with them, we are learning, we are growing, we are becoming empowered, and we are building the essence of a lived democracy.”
I added that welcoming the opportunity ethical challenges present is essential. “If you think, ‘I wish this wasn’t happening, and maybe if I ignore it, it will go away,’ it always gets worse.”
We talked about a number of deep questions, such as accountability. You may face a conflict between your legal contract—say with a funder who underwrites a project—and your moral contract, which may be to always support the people you’re working with. That is often your ultimate accountability, even though those on the other side of the conflict may have greater power. What do you do when that choice appears? That question led us into an interesting discussion about funders’ power and intentions.
Right after that, we asked workshop participants to share ethical challenges they’d experienced which they thought might make a good case-study for us to try out the process. The example we picked had to do with a community arts group that recently acquired a building. They often worked with immigrants, refugees, and others under stress. There were far-right groups in their neighborhood, and they had a dilemma, are they ethically or politically obliged to treat every group that wants to use the space for a meeting or an event in the same way?
In the balance of the episode, François and I summarize and comment on what workshop participants had to say as we went through the process. Step one is to describe the issue as fully and even handedly as possible. You’re not favoring either side. Speakers make I statements, they role-play a person who really believes the viewpoint that they’re stating. Step two is to look through the lens of your own values and commitments. Do you have a bias? What might you be missing? People tend to make snap judgments when they hear a story. But as more voices come into the conversation and people hear different points of view, that can change.
Step three is to dig very deeply. We suggested that people imagine themselves as visitors from Mars, seeing everything in the controversy with newbie eyes. Step four, then, after you’ve noted everything that you can imagine is relevant to the situation, is to list all possible resolutions, even the ones that annoy or repel you, so that everyone can see the whole picture of possibility. The fifth and final step is to brainstorm ways to share all of this so that the whole group—and maybe the whole neighborhood, depending on the situation—has a chance to understand what’s going on and to help resolve it. Arts groups tend to be well-equipped to do this, creating a Forum Theatre or a staged reading, doing story circles, holding a debate, publishing people’s ideas in print or or on website so everyone has the whole story before talking it through and determining how to respond.
We hope you enjoy the episode!
Alice Russell, “Mirror, Mirror on the Wolf (Tell The Story Right).”