Programme for JOIN

Written By Sian Vaughan

The programme is now available for our 2026 conference Join: Crafting Conversations with Communities on 1 July. Our 2026 conference focuses on how participatory art, craft and design practices are understood in relation to shifting institutional, social, and economic conditions today. We are really looking forward to welcoming artists, makers, and writers to join our conversation.

A few tickets are still available: register here (it is free!). You can download the abstracts and a printable version of the programme.

Join: Crafting Conversations with Communities Programme

09:30-10:00 Registration and refreshments

10:00-10:45 Keynote

  • Prof Rowan Bailey, University of Huddersfield: Creating Places: Communities, Collaboration and Cultural Exchange

10:45-12:15 Panel A

  • Tim Machin & Becky Shaw: A Script by the Side of the Road: Materialising a social imaginary through reading aloud

  • Jane Thakoordin: Veminism for the People! Visual embodied participatory arts practices, and planting seeds of dissent

  • Lisa Metherell: Without a Care? On Risk Taking and Vulnerability in Creative Practice

10:45-12:15 Panel B

  • Sian Hindle: Networked Siloes: Connecting the communities of Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter

  • Gavin Wade: Filling Each Other’s Cup

  • Cathy Wade: The children built cat cafes, museums, bakeries, healthcare facilities, supermarkets and spas

12:15-13:00 Lunch

13:00-14:00 Panel C

  • Marek K Wieczorek: Applied Creativity: Reconnecting with Nature’s Abundance and Collective Biomimic Making

  • Christina Moraru: Between Care and Capital: The Political Economy of Collaboration in Times of Crisis

14:00-14:45 Keynote

  • Lara Ratnaraja, Independent Consultant: The Co-opting of Collaboration: Deconstructing Value, Power and Agency in Cultural Collaboration and Critique

14:45-15:15 Refreshments

15:15-16:45 Panel D

  • Sven Kammerer & Francesco Ferrero: Making Otherwise: Hope Labour, Commoning and Shared Authorship in Community-Led Practice

  • Charlie Collins: A gentle approach to value measurement: Recentring the practitioner through portraiture

  • Tina Francis: If everyone wears hi-vis nobody is visible - Co creation and the subtle art of saying no

15:15-16:45 Panel E

  • Elena Brianzi: Global Tools: Ecological Perspectives in Collaborative Artistic Practices in 1970s Italy

  • Or Tshuva: Working in Reverse: Community-Embedded Curatorial Practice and the Contradictions of Polycrisis

  • Lukas Strasser and Luise Rellensmann: Collective Knowledge, Care and Repair: Cultural Production in K12, a Cooperative Housing Project in Berlin

16:45-17:00 Closing remarks

Sian Vaughan
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Global Surrealist Photography